i want to eat something delicious

location: chez moi

Since I only needed half of the brioche dough to use for my sticky buns, I had to think about what to do with the other half. Since I also had some chocolate ganache on hand, I decided to make some chocolate brioche.

I just filled balls of brioche dough with chocolate and placed them into little muffin cups and let them rise for a bit.

I brushed the tops with egg wash and baked them until they were highly risen up and golden brown. The chocolate kind of spilled over (the dark splotches you see), but thankfully they were easy to clean off.

Brioche is a really nice bread. It’s soft and fluffy and layered.

location: chez moi

Now that school is over, I have had more opportunity to make yeast leavened baked goods (which are my favorite to make and eat). I have wanted to make these sticky buns for a while, and finally got down to it.

The base for these sticky buns is a brioche dough. I first combine flour, eggs, yeast, sugar, salt and water. These ingredients form into a kind of dry, stiff dough.

The top left picture shows the dough after the initial ingredients have been incorporated. I actually ended up kneading it a bit by hand to help incorporate all the flour in. Stand mixers are nice, but sometimes doing things by hand are more effective. After the dough has come together, I add in butter, a little at a time, until fully incorporated. In the end, it becomes like the lower image, so smooth, silky, smooth… like a baby’s bottom. Combining the butter was actually a bit difficult, as the butter did not incorporate readily into the stiff dough. So again, I used my hands to pull the dough together before allowing the mixer to knead.

Then, I placed the dough into a bowl and set it in the fridge to proof overnight. This made enough for two batches of sticky buns.

After the dough had proofed in the refrigerator, I divided it in half and rolled it out into a rectangle. I apologize for the orange images. I find often when I take pictures of dough (or maybe something more on the white side), images often have this color and it’s hard for me to avoid. I’m not sure how to prevent it.

After rolling out the dough, I put on a mixture of sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon and toasted pecans. Then, I roll the dough into a tight log.

I slice the log into individual buns and place into the ‘sticky’ part of the sticky bun, which is a combination of sugar, honey, cream, butter, salt and pecans.

After letting the dough rise for a couple hours, they greatly increase in volume so that the dough is very light and fluffy and the buns are touching.

I bake the buns until the tops are golden brown. They rise even more in the oven so that they almost fill up the entire pan.

After letting the buns cool for about 20 minutes, I flip them out so the sticky caramel goes to the top.

These are on the sweeter side, but I found them quite delicious, especially when they were warm out of the oven. The brioche dough is so tender and soft, and you can pull out the bread in layers when you eat. The softness on the inside was in nice contrast to the slightly crusty exterior and sticky, sweet caramel and crisp, toasted pecans.

location: Ma’s Restaurant (San Jose, CA)

1715 Lundy Ave
San Jose, CA 95131

I would come to this place just for their sesame green onion bread. It is so good. The other dishes are not bad too, but the sesame bread? That’s on another level.

While ordering, some complimentary peanuts. I don’t eat any though, as I have a slight allergy.

As a starter, we got some hot and sour soup, which I think is a favorite of my family. This was actually really quite hot and sour! Pretty good. There were also slivers of chicken in here, which I have not really seen before in hot and sour soup.

Since I love tofu, here’s some mapo tofu. It wasn’t super spicy or anything, but tofu really can’t be bad. I do wish the sauce was a little less gelatinous though.

For vegetables, some dou miao. Can’t go wrong there. 

And here, some walnut prawns, something my family likes to order since we like it so much and like to see which place makes it best. I think some people prefer the more mayonnaise heavy version, but I prefer it like this, where the prawns have a sweet, crisp exterior, and yet are not like a breaded, fried shrimp. I thought these were made well, although the walnuts were not really candied at all. In fact, they were a little sour..

This place also makes dough slice noodles. We wanted to have these noodles with a beef and black bean sauce, but they apparently only make black bean sauce noodles with the flat rice noodles.. why the limitation? Well anyways, since we wanted those particular noodles, we got it with a regular beef and vegetable combination. I thought the noodles were pretty good. The texture was a little uneven between different parts of the noodles and different strands, but I liked the thick sections, which were chewy. The other ingredients, the beef, egg, some carrots and lettuce tasted okay but were not particularly special and looked a little messy.

And the highlight of the meal, the sesame green onion bread. So. Good. The outside was incredibly crusty and crisp, smothered in toasted sesame. The inside was filled with delicious green onion, soft and warm, fluffy, and kind of reminded me of mantou. I think this time I came, it was probably the best one I’ve had.

taste: 8/10

overall quality: 7/10

desire to return: 8.5/10

location: Bi-Rite Creamery (San Francisco, CA)

3692 18th St
San Francisco, CA 94110

Right across from Mission High School lies this little ice cream shop. I would think, students probably come here all the time since it’s so convenient. It’s probably a great little after school spot. When I come to an ice cream shop, I always want to try all the flavors! But I have to limit myself. I wonder how they would react though, if I asked for a sample of everything.

This is the brown sugar ginger caramel ice cream, which I got. I liked it because there were swirls of caramel that was in thick, liquid form, so it was almost like a caramel sauce. The ginger flavor was very faint, but you could taste a bit of a spiciness if you savored the ice cream in your mouth. 

Here is a double scoop of balsamic strawberry on the left and the ginger caramel again on the right. The balsamic strawberry didn’t taste strongly of balsamic, although the flavor was certainly different from regular strawberry ice cream. Bi-rite makes very thick and creamy ice cream, quite different from Ici, which can be much icier and lighter. I think I can prefer either under different occasions. I like the creaminess of Bi-rite’s ice cream on the tongue, although it’s heavier so you can’t eat as much.

taste: 8/10

overall quality: 8/10

desire to return: 7/10

location: Cafe Claude (San Francisco, CA)

7 Claude Ln 
San Francisco, CA 94108

This restaurant is located on a little street called Claude Ln. There are so many restaurants named after the street are on. Or maybe the street was named after the restaurant. Hmm..

To start off, some complimentary bread and butter. I don’t usually like to spread butter though - I just eat the bread plain.

This is the frisée aux lardons - frisée salad, Nueske’s bacon, soft poached egg, sherry vinaigrette. We broke up the poached egg so the runny, silky smooth yolk would mix in with the vinaigrette and coat the greens. There was an enormous amount of lardons, which were thick cut, salty, a bit chewy and very meaty. It almost felt like a lardon salad with a side of frisée.

And here’s a must get, the escargots en croute - garlic, butter, parsley, almond, pernod, shallots, anchovy, puff pastry.

I think I had escargot once before and had an average perception of it. I actually really don’t like snails, as in, live ones. There’s just something about them.. but I made the effort to get over that to enjoy this dish, and enjoy I did. The snails were very tender, and flavored so delicious with the garlic and herbs, to give the essence of a pesto. The flavored butter remaining at the bottom of the dish was also perfect to dip bread in. I enjoyed the puff pastry at the top, which gave a nice textural contrast to the escargot, but I felt it was slightly undercooked, as not to be as flaky and layered as it could have been.

For the main dish, we got the thon - pan roasted tombo tuna, flageolet ragu, shaved fennel, dandelion greens and kumquats. This was a very interesting dish. I remember my high school Japanese teacher told us before, if you go to someone’s house to eat and they ask how you like a dish that you actually don’t like, you can say, “おもしろい..” which means ‘interesting.’ I think the quality of ingredients seemed alright, but just the combination of flavors was hard to get used to.

These are dandelion greens, which had a really bitter flavor. It was combined with the sweet and tart kumquats, creamy, kind of sweet and salty beans.. I think the dandelion greens in particular had a flavor I wasn’t accustomed to. The tuna also wasn’t ideal. It had a kind of tough and dry seared exterior and had a certain fishiness about it that wasn’t as palatable. I wish we had ordered a different entree, as I think something else could have been really good.

taste: 6.5/10

overall quality: 7.5/10

desire to return: 7/10

location: chez moi

I made croissants once before, or I think I probably tried in high school before too. This time, I think they turned out pretty well, with the dough rising and producing a flaky, fluffy and layered interior.

The dough starts off simply with some water, yeast, sugar, flour and evaporated milk. I knead it all together by hand until it is smooth and let it chill in the refrigerator. In the meantime, I had also formed a butter block (literally a block of butter) to fold into the dough. This is similar to making puff pastry, except the dough has yeast.

After everything has chilled and is cold (important!), I can package the butter into the dough and roll it out to make the folds/turns.

To make a turn, just roll out the dough (with butter encapsulated within) and fold it in thirds. I turn it 90 degrees and do the same thing before letting it chill in the fridge. Then, I roll it out again and fold it in thirds once again, after which the dough is ready. It’s good to chill the dough after you have rolled it to ensure it stays really cold. You don’t want the butter to melt, as you need the layers of butter and dough to create the desired texture.

For regular croissants, I roll the dough out and cut it into triangles. I use scraps to ‘fill’ each croissant and roll it up.

For chocolate croissants, I cut the dough into long rectangles and roll it up from the two edges with chocolate chips filled in.

After a couple hours, the dough is nicely risen and plump. At this point, I also was able to take pictures in natural lighting so the images are not so yellow.

After brushing the tops with egg wash, they are ready for the oven.

The egg wash allows the croissants to brown up quite nicely. You can see the kind of roughness in the exterior, which shows its flakiness.

They were flaky and slightly crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside. I liked the richness and creaminess of the chocolate in the chocolate croissants too.

I love the smell of croissants. The aroma and flavor of butter can’t be beat. Croissants take a while to make, mostly because of waiting time, but it’s worth the extra time!

location: Oriental Restaurant (Berkeley, CA)

1782 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709

There are a lot of places down Shattuck I haven’t been, and many that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t often eat Chinese food out, and I don’t think I’ve eaten much Vietnamese food in Berkeley, but I got to try this place for a weeknight dinner.

These are some fresh shrimp rolls, wrapped in rice paper with rice noodles and lettuce. I think I would have liked more of an herb inside as well. I enjoyed the elasticity in the rice paper and the roll dipped in the sweet sauce.

Since we had fresh spring rolls, we decided to get some fried rolls as well. These were filled with chicken, although it was not very detectable. The outside was very crispy and the filling a little mushy. I like spring rolls where the filling is very carefully made, and you can clearly taste and see all the ingredients inside. 

For the main dishes, the combination clay pot (left) and the vietnamese rice vermicelli salad bowl with bbq chicken (right), which came with a fried roll as well.

The rice bowl came with lid on and steaming away. It seemed promising. The combination came with chicken, shrimp, beef, vegetable and rice, although in terms of the protein, I got more chicken than anything else.

I liked the array of vegetables and the generous portion, but the rice was overcooked. It was too soft and mushy. I also think one of the best things about a clay pot is how the rice gets crispy underneath. In this case, it was crispy, but also a little burnt.

I tried a bit of the noodle salad, which seemed light and refreshing. The bbq chicken had a nice char. As Anne Burrell puts it, “Brown food tastes good.”

taste: 6/10

overall quality: 6/10

desire to return: 6/10

location: Cavalli Cafe (San Francisco, CA)

1441 Stockton St
San Francisco, CA 94133

Since we were around Little Italy, we had to stop by one of the many places that offer tiramisu. We searched on yelp, and this place seemed to have good reviews, and was also the one closest to us. However, it took us forever to find it! The streets are very confusing in San Francisco..

This tiramisu was quite good, with the lady fingers not overwhelmingly soaked with the espresso as to become too soft and mushy. The mascarpone filling was smooth and creamy, yet light and not too heavy, not too sweet. 

taste: 8/10

overall quality: 8/10

desire to return: 7/10

location: Mama’s (San Francisco, CA)

1701 Stockton St
San Francisco, CA 94133

I heard this place was good, but required a long wait. We came here early on a Saturday morning, and the line (or mass of people) was already way out the door. Although the restaurant itself is quite small, they are actually very efficient. They have worked out the system well so the line moves at a good pace, they allow you to enter at the proper time, you order your food before you are seated, and your food comes soon after you are at the table. 

While waiting in the line to order, we could watch them cook, as well as view these  breads, which I think they use for their french toasts.

Here’s a cocktail of I believe peach and apple. 

We got the chocolate cinnamon french toast (left) and dungeness crab benedict (right), which is a weekend special.

The french toast was pretty good, with fluffy bread that wasn’t too drenched in batter. I think I prefer the french toast I’ve had at La Note though, which has just slightly superior texture, at least for my taste. This french toast was topped with a lot of delicious, sweet, fresh fruit, which I enjoyed.

The crab cake benedict was composed of an english muffin topped with large pieces of fresh crab meat, spinach, a poached egg and hollandaise sauce, with potatoes on the side.

The egg was poached very nicely, with a runny yet thick yolk, and soft but firm egg white. I enjoyed the tender spinach and the large pieces of sweet, fresh crab meat, which had a hint lemon juice. I was a little disappointed by the mushy texture of the english muffin though. The bottom got soggy (perhaps from sauce or moisture from toppings), which was not pleasant in the mouth. The outer ring remained crusty and crisp though, which was enjoyable.

taste: 7/10

overall quality: 6.5/10

desire to return: 6/10

location: chez mes amis

I love my friends! Aren’t they so sweet for throwing me a surprise bon voyage. I’m leaving in a couple weeks, but they so thoughtfully put this together, with this gorgeous sign made by vvncreates.

To celebrate the french theme, they made ratatouille. How beautiful it is with sliced tomatoes on top, hearty vegetables underneath.

Here, a delicious oven baked breaded chicken, with crisp skin and moist tender meat beneath. I know they took much care in rubbing all the ingredients into the chicken so it was so well flavored.

Some chicken pizza. We also had some spinach and bbq pizza as well.

Some glazed buns for dessert. We also had other cookies, symphony pancakes, bread and oil for dipping, chips, fruit and vegetables and dip.

The apartment was also so nicely decorated, with ribbons and pictures hung throughout, as well as this hand drawn eiffel tower, courtesy of vvncreates. Isn’t she so talented?