The Best Place to Find Rare Citrus Like Yuzu and Pink Limes: De Santis Farms

Categories: Local Flavor
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Ever heard of blood limes? Neither had SFoodie.
For years, SFoodie has found it impossible to visit the Alemany Farmers' Market without gawking at Rosa de Santis's citrus stand. Her cara caras and oro blanco grapefruit are positively mundane -- there are boxes of sweet limes and nobbly Seville oranges to paw through and smell, and up on the cash register table De Santis keeps even rarer fruits like Buddha's hand citrons and calamansi limes. We've brought home fresh bergamots to zest into a fruit crisp, and pink limes to make into a cooler. This may be the best place in the city to hit up for cocktail experimentation.

De Santis, who moved to California with her family from Italy decades ago -- somewhere between Rome and Naples, she says -- has been selling citrus at San Francisco farmers' markets for 30 years; she's at both the Alemany and Civic Center markets. The De Santises didn't set out to grow Filipino limes or or strangely shaped Chinese citrons. They just wanted to grow blood oranges, like the kind they ate back in Italy. "Where we come from, that 's the only orange we know," she says. "But over here, when we started selling it, people would get upset. 'What'd you put in my orange?' they'd ask. We had to do a lot of education. Now they love it."

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Schmendricks Pursues the Brooklyn Bagel

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SusanNYC/Flickr
Brooklyn bagels: Schmendricks' holy grail.
"As a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, I've always done the NY bagel snob where I complained and complained and complained," says David Kover, one of the cofounders of Schmendricks Bagels, "Until another friend told me to shut up." 

Kover, a psychologist and food writer, took the advice to heart. Working with his neighbors, Deepa Subramanian and her husband, Kover and his wife began baking batches of bagels in his Mission apartment two years ago, chasing after the taste of the bagels his family would pick up every weekend. He didn't have much luck until he tracked down an old high-school classmate on Facebook who had worked in the bagel shop as a kid; his friend offered Kover a couple of baking tips that made all the difference. "We eventually had something really good," he says.

That was when the four neighbors decided to go into the bagel-baking business. Bakers from the two households have been shuttling back and forth, testing batches, for months, and the two couples took an exploratory trip back to Brooklyn, hitting 13 bagel shops in one morning. A few months ago, they signed a lease on a commercial kitchen. Subramanian quit her job as a corporate lawyer to serve as Schmendricks' head baker. Now they're trying to scale up their recipes to work with the larger ovens.

So what are the characteristics of a perfect bagel, according to Kover?

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Rancho Gordo Partners Up with Diana Kennedy to Import Rare Oaxacan Chiles

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Workman Books
Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo.
Steve Sando, Rancho Gordo founder and author of Heirloom Beans, just returned from a two-week road trip around Mexico with legendary cookbook author Diana Kennedy and Gael Garcia Bernal's mother, a telenovela star. They were hunting for rare Oaxacan chiles -- and more specifically, farmers who would be willing to grow them for export. 

"Bernal and her husband are filmmakers who are working on a documentary about Kennedy's life," Sando explains. "If you're wanting to do business with farmers in rural Oaxaca, though, it's probably not the best way to come into the town with a gringo, Diana Kennedy, and a couple of TV stars. It was really kind of wild."

Rancho Gordo is famous in its own right, of course, for growing photogenic and flavorful heirloom beans in northern California. Over the course of the past several years, Sando has taken on the role of helping Mexican farmers preserve their heirloom beans as well. Working with a Mexican company called Xoxoc, he contracts out with Mexican farmers to grow beans, corn, and herbs for him, which is how he met up with the cookbook author.

Kennedy, author of Oaxaca al Gusto and a gastronomic preservationist, is helping Sando identify and find rare chiles -- hard to find in Oaxaca City, almost impossible to locate in North America -- that make Oaxacan dishes possible to cook in the United States. Not only that, Sando needs the chiles, which are susceptible to white fly larva, to be grown without tons of fertilizers and pesticides. 

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Pal's Takeaway Begins Serving TV Dinners

Categories: Local Flavor
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Pal's Takeaway, the permanent popup on 24th Street whose sandwiches the SF Weekly has loved up on numerous occasions, has come up with a new product to sell: take-home TV dinners. Yep, the kind that come in compartmentalized aluminum containers covered in foil. Starting this week, every Thursday Pal's owner Jeff Mason is going to make up a batch of TV dinners to sell for $12 apiece.

But, Mason writes, he's not spending his days dicing carrots into precise cubes to toss with organic peas. The menu for his first TV dinner: Brined and roasted chicken breast with maple vinegar sauce. Smashed Red Lasota potatoes (from Full Belly Farms) with black olives, pimentón, and parsley. And sautéed Riverdog Farms rainbow chard with golden raisins.

Pal's closes at 2:30 p.m., but Tony's Market (2751 24th St.), which houses the sandwich counter, will continue selling the dinners for people coming home from work.

SFoodie asked Mason how the TV dinners should be reheated. "In the oven only," he wrote back. "Microwaves are good for drying damp socks."

Follow us on Twitter: @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook.
Follow me at @JonKauffman.

Where Do You Go on the Wharf? Ask a Concierge

Categories: Local Flavor
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devonapple/Flickr
Scoma's is the concierges' number-one choice for Wharf dining.
SF Weekly aims to be more of an insider's newspaper than a national guide to all things San Francisco, so I don't get to Fisherman's Wharf often. Locals don't dine there as often as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. But ocasionally, visitors to town ask me where they can go eat seafood on the Wharf.

So I figured I'd call some of the other professional critics in town: hotel concierges. Concierges wield a lot of power in this tourist-friendly city, and they spend a lot of nights eating out -- often on the restaurant's dime -- to figure out where to steer guests. A few days ago, I polled 10 hotel concierges from both swank and midrange hotels. Where do you send visitors? I asked. More importantly, where would you eat yourself?More >>

Frankaroni: a 4505 Meats Treat

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Carina Ost
​Do your dream of hot dog slices, great fried balls of macaroni and cheese, and can't stop humming the Rice-A-Roni jingle? Well, we have got the teenage wet dream treat for you.

If you are lucky on Thursday or Saturday and the super cool clique at the 4505 Meats food stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market feels like blessing you with "Frankaroni" written on their specials board, you can get to sit and eat at the proverbial cool lunch table.

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Rocky's Frybread Brings Green Chile Season to El Rio

Categories: Local Flavor

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via Flickr
​New Mexico may be a long ways away, but Rocky's Frybread is bringing some of its flavors into San Francisco at El Rio this week.

A little bird (a.k.a. Twitter) tipped us off and got us all excited. Hit the jump for more.

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Cotogna Brown-Bags Lunch to Go

Categories: Local Flavor

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​When we heard Cotogna was starting up brown-bag lunches to go for $12, we had to try one.

The restaurant chef Michael Tusk opened as a more approachable neighbor to his high-end Quince seems perfect for the concept, as it specializes in hearth-roasted meats and other brown-baggable fare.

Today's lunch included a porchetta sandwich, a container of rigatoni and mustard green salad, and a chocolate chip cookie.

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Livin' It Up with the "Hotel California" Menu at Orson

Categories: Local Flavor

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Robin Jolin Productions
The dish is called "Can't Kill the Beast," but it looks dead to us
​"Hotel California" by the Eagles is best known as a slightly spooky song that every dummy at a party will bust out on the guitar in an effort to impress girls. At least that's what I remember from college, other than running for the door.

Starting Thursday, Aug. 11, it will be the inspiration and thread for a four-course menu with cocktail pairings at Orson, in an effort to impress cocktail geeks, Eagles fans (we think they still exist), and foodies alike.

According to chef Elizabeth Falkner, "We have made up a dinner menu with cocktail pairings loosely based on this classic song that will change as the California seasons change."

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A Guide to San Francisco's Concert Hall Food

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​Let's face it -- concerts just aren't as fun if you're hungry and thinking about Hot Pockets the whole time. Indeed, even the Bay Citizen has noticed an increased interest in how food and music can go together quite nicely. In the same spirit (and with empty, gurgling bellies), we present this guide to what's cooking at these Bay Area concert halls.

The Warfield just brought in a menu by Show Dogs, a nearby sausage joint. Hungry fans can get sausages like the 49'er All Beef Dog, Chicken Curry Dog, or Maple Bacon Dog (all $8). If you like your pork outside of a dog, you can get a pulled pork sandwich ($10), or you can opt for wings or a veggie dog.

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