San Francisco

The dukes of Praslin-Choiseul stem from one of the most illustrious noble families in France, but they are best known because one of their pastry chefs invented the confection known as praliné in honor of his patron. Brillat-Savarin famously wrote “the invention of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star”. Apparently it does wonders for a family’s name recognition as well.

Praliné is basically a blend of finely ground hazelnuts and almonds and cooked with boiling sugar (otherwise, it would just be another form of marzipan). If it is mixed with chocolate, it becoms gianduja. If the nut fragments remain discernable in a matrix of caramelized sugar, the result is nougatine, one of the heights of French pastry-making. One interesting variety is feuilleté praliné, where the praliné is blended with pieces of extremely fine and crisp wafers to yield a confection that has at once the smoothness of praliné and the crispiness of a flaky pastry. When I was a kid, I would often buy “Lutti Noisettor”, a hard hazelnut-flavored candy where the core had this same stratified laminated and crunchy texture, but it seems it has been discontinued, perhaps the fabrication technique was too complex to be profitable.

Michael Recchiuti is a chocolatier who moved to the San Francisco about a decade ago to start his confectionery business with his wife Jacky. He has a boutique in the Ferry Building food court and a number of the better groceries in the city carry his products. A small operation like his cannot make its own chocolate couverture, and it appears he relies on Guittard, another reputable San Francisco company. In addition to his lovely chocolate bouchées, Recchiuti makes a line of chocolate tablets.

My favorite one is the Hazelnut Praline, which is actually a feuilleté praliné. A safety disclaimer ought to be mandatory on the wrapper, as biting into a piece is an amazingly intense experience. The couverture is excellent, but it is the praliné that grabs your attention: rich, dark, clearly made with a high proprtion of nuts to sugar and blended with dark rather than milk chocolate, and with the delightful crispy texture of feuilletine. Everyone I gave a taste of this bar had the same reaction of utter amazement, it is that good.

The chocolate bar is clearly made by hand, as you can see from the irregular shape on the other side of the mold. This is unfortunate in a way, as it means distribution will remain limited for the foreseeable future. I have worked it into my standard tour of San Francisco for visiting friends and relatives, as they are unlikely to experience it elsewhere.

Update (2006-11-24):

All good things come to pass, and this product has been discontinued. The other Recchuti bars seem uninspiring.

Britain is not known for being a gastronomic haven (although the situation has improved dramatically in London over the last 20 years or so). Still, they have some decent grocery products, like shortbread or Ribena blackcurrant drinks. US specialty groceries carry some, but by no means all British delights.

A few weeks ago, a small shop specialized in imported British foodstuffs opened in my neighborhood. The product it carries are the kind you would expect to find in a regular grocery store in the UK, don’t expect esoteric Fortnum & Mason luxuries here, but a solid and growing selection, and a good destination for anyone who would like a little diversity in their daily vittles.

You Say Tomato, 1526 California (between Larkin and Polk), 415-921-2828

Update (2021-04-15):

It closed a few years ago.

Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on Wednesday a bill to ban the production and sale of foie gras in California in 2012. The bill was pushed by his outgoing horse-trading partner, Democratic state senator John Burton. The highly dubious rationale is that the force-feeding of ducks or geese to produce foie gras is “cruel”. I can think of many culinary preparations that would qualify, such as lobsters or crabs boiled alive. Then again, many more people eat crustaceans than foie gras, thus they are not as safe a target for a grandstanding politician who has no compunctions about trying to stuff his unwanted offspring down San Francisco voters’ throats.

I think the last thing San Francisco’s stricken economy needs is another coup de grâce to its’ restaurants, one of the few local industries that can (just barely) survive its business-hostile climate (our restaurateur mayor Gavin Newsom seems to agree). In the meantime, better to make your reservations at the French Laundry while you still can. In seven years’ time, the only place you will be able to get your fix will be from shady characters in the dark alleys of the Tenderloin, if its gentrification is not complete by then. If you think foie gras is expensive today…

Bread is the staff of life. – Jonathan Swift

Atkins faddists notwithstanding, bread has been with us ever since mankind migrated from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, and to urban civilization, its corollary. Bread plays an important role in religious symbolism, from the unleavened bread of Jewish Passover, the transsubstantiation of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer, or Muslim tradition according to which the cause of Adam’s expulsion from Eden was wheat, not apples. The emblem of the Nizam of Hyderabad, my parents’ birthplace, was a “kulcha”, a sort of flat bread. Legend has it, a hermit prophesied the Nizam’s dynasty would last for seven generations because its founder ate seven kulchas while the hermit’s guest.

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. – Henry Miller

The Bay Area is gifted with a plethora of artisan bakers, preparing all sorts of delights from the Noe Valley Bakery cherry-chocolate bread, to the more touristy (but perfectly acceptable) Boudin sourdough bread. There is even a website dedicated to local bakeries (it does not seem to have been updated very recently, however). Indeed, America has San Francisco to thank for the artisan bread revolution, started by Alice Waters and Acme Bread, just as Seattle is responsible for improving coffee standards nationwide. In America, restaurant critics inspect restrooms. In France, they ponder the quality of the bread and coffee served…

How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex? – Julia Child

What’s more, good bread is actually cheaper. The plastery Wonderbread, originally introduced by the ITT conglomerate, retails for $3.69 a loaf at my local Cala Foods, whereas a loaf of Acme’s delightfully nutty “Upstairs Bread” is a mere $2.50. Some bakeries like Southern California’s La Brea Bakery are helping popularize bread by shipping frozen semi-cooked loaves to the large grocery chains, who finish baking on their premises. While purists sniff with disdain at the technique, it is very close in quality to the real thing, and miles ahead of industrial bread.

Ghirardelli is the best-known chocolate maker from San Francisco, but by no means the only one. The Bay Area is very serious about food, and boasts many fine chocolatiers such as Guittard, Scharffen-Berger, Joseph Schmidt, and Michael Recchiuti, all of which uphold a much higher standard of quality than Ghirardelli (while not inedible dreck like Hershey’s, Ghirardelli is over-sweet and fairly lackluster).

Guittard is not as well known, as they used not to sell retail (their chocolate is used, among others, by See’s Candies and Boudin Bakery, and I once had a wonderful cherry and Guittard chocolate cake at Eno in Atlanta). This changed when they recently introduced a line of premium chocolates, named after the firms’s French founder, Etienne Guittard.

They probably don’t have an extensive distribution network yet, but their products are starting to trickle into finer San Francisco groceries like my neighborhood one, Lebeau Nob Hill Market (“People in the Know / Shop at Lebeau”).

I bought a 500g box of their “Soleil d’Or” milk chocolate, packaged as a box of “wafers” (little quarter-sized pieces reminiscent of Droste Pastilles). In this form, it is intended for cooking, but the bite-sized wafers are also perfect for snacking. It has a relatively high cocoa content for milk chocolate (38%, the usual is more like 32%), which gives it a satisfying taste that lingers in the mouth. This chocolate is also well balanced, it does not have the malty harshness of Scharffen-Berger milk chocolate or the milky aftertaste of Valrhona “Le Lacté”. In fact, it comes close to my personal favorite, Michel Cluizel “Grand Lait Java”, no small achievement, specially when you consider the difference in cocoa content (38% vs. 50%) and the price difference ($9 for a 500g box vs. $5 for a 100g tablet).

Update (2004-12-30):

Guittard updated their packaging (shown right). The newer one is more classy and eschews the pretentious “Soleil d’Or” and “Collection Etienne” labels, but the chocolate itself is unchanged. The box is also slightly lighter (1lb or 454g vs. 500g for the older one, i.e. a 10% price increase…), but at $9.99/lb, you are still paying Lindt prices for near Cluizel quality