Cook It

Tart for the Sweet

By Gretchen Giles

While most of us go ga-ga for chocolate this time of year, there are other ways to tickle the palate with pleasure. At Santi in Geyserville, chef and co-owner Franco Dunn suggests a purely Italian take on sweetening up the month of February, with his citrus almond torte. Simple to make and resulting in what Dunn assures is a “thoroughly adult” pleasure, this cake benefits from the thick-skinned fruit readily available on winter’s shelves. Be sure to use best-quality ingredients and organic citrus.

Citrus Almond Torte
2 small oranges and one small lemon
6 ounces toasted whole almonds
4 eggs
1/2 t salt
1-1/2 c. sugar
1 c. all purpose flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
2/3 c. olive oil

Simmer oranges and lemon in water to cover for 30 minutes. Drain and cool.

Discard the lemon pulp and finely chop the lemon skin. Finely chop all of the oranges, the skin and the pulp.

Chop the almonds by pulsing in a food processor; be careful not too chop them too finely.

Beat eggs and salt together until foamy and gradually add the sugar.

Sift in the flour and baking powder and gently blend in the fruit, nuts and oil. Do not over mix.

Bake in a buttered 9- or 10-inch spring-form pan a 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes. The cake is done when a wooden skewer can be cleanly removed from the center of the torte.

Let cool on a rack and remove from the pan. Serve with zabaglione or whipped cream.

Not surprisingly, Santi offers a prix-fixe Valentine¹s Day menu of thoroughly Italian descent. The five-course ³supper² ranges from the sea to the garden to the meadow, ending with a choice of Italian truffles, rose geranium-scented panna cotta or the first strawberries of winter both filled and dipped in chocolate.

Santi, 21047 Geyserville Ave, Geyserville. 707.857.1790.

From the February 9-15, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Waiting Room: When it’s open, Julia’s Kitchen never looks like this.

Dessert Is for Lovers

Julia’s Kitchen pastry whiz Nicole Plue wants you to share

By Heather Irwin

There are two questions you immediately want to ask pastry chef Nicole Plue. The first is whether her former boss, Martha Stewart, is as notoriously difficult as the mini-dramas, tell-all writers and tabloids would have us believe. The second is, can I lick the beaters? No, really. Can I?

Dressed in her chef’s whites and clogs, Plue fortunately has a good sense of humor for people with sticky fingers. Winner of Bon Appetit‘s Best Dessert, New York award, she’s been a pastry chef for 14 years, after all, and most days you’ll find her at Pinot Blanc restaurant or at the far end of Julia’s Kitchen in Napa’s COPIA complex whisking and stirring some combination of butter, sugar or cream into artfully plated desserts you can’t help but want to pilfer.

One of the most celebrated pastry chefs in the state, Plue is different. She is obsessed not with chocolate or elaborate towers of spun sugar, but with more local ingredients: stone fruit, rhubarb and just about anything else growing in the gardens and orchards of COPIA. Eschewing fussy, pretentious desserts, Plue is more comfortable creating funky, updated versions of old standbys like rhubarb crisp, peanut butter cookies, herb-infused pot de crème and apple tarts inspired by Julia Child.

She will never create some sort of chocolate-upon-chocolate blowout for the menu. “I’ve just never found that sort of thing interesting,” she shrugs, though chocoholics should fear not: there’s always something wickedly chocolate to eat on Nicole Plue’s menu.

Walking through COPIA’s industrial-sized kitchens, I get a disappointing answer to a question before I’ve even mustered the nerve to ask it. The large mixers filled with sugar and cream turn out to be bath-sized rather than licking-sized. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I’ve just met Plue and getting naked in her mixing bowls seems just a little forward. Not to mention those pesky health codes, damn them.

Which brings us to another somewhat awkward situation: Plue works in an open kitchen just feet away from diners. Though she can pull off a chef’s swagger, Plue is not exactly comfortable putting on Emeril Live for diners every night, let alone enduring that horrid moment should someone dislike her food.

“Sometimes I just can’t look up,” she says. Though reviews are more glowing than otherwise, someone’s always a critic, and folks tend to feel especially entitled when they come to a restaurant named for Julia Child, the grande dame of French cooking.

Just Desserts: Napa pastry chef Nicole Plue is a sweets sensation.

Plue, however, takes it all in stride. “I don’t let good or bad reviews change what I do,” she says, plating up a selection of desserts. Everything, she says, has been done and done again, which Plue feels frees her up to not worry that much over whether she’s being original. She’s more concerned about things tasting good. “You want to taste, right?” she asks, pulling things from trays and the tiny refrigerator in her station.

Do I want to taste? Hmm. Let me ponder that one as I rip the plate from your hands and knock you over to get a spoon. Got any milk to go with this?

The dessert grouping, however, is an odd mix. A tiny peanut butter cookie inspired by La Brea bakery founder Nancy Silverton, a sage-infused chocolate pot de crème, a grapefruit flavored marshmallow and one of her signature dishes crunchy dessert called peanut gianduja. Don’t ask me to say it. I can’t.

Chocolate is usually a delightfully supporting cast member, rarely taking the lead role in Plue’s desserts. And though it would be a career-ending statement for other pastry chefs, Plue says she’s not the biggest fan of chocolate on its own. Not that she doesn’t understand that other folks live, love and die for it. It’s just never been that interesting to her, maybe because when she was learning to cook in her mom’s kitchen, chocolate wasn’t easily available. Instead, her parents were health nuts who always had lots of fruit and nuts in the cupboard.

“I’m totally influenced by the garden,” she says, pointing outside to COPIA’s fledgling herb and fruit gardens. “I do this flight of pots de crème with lavender, bay leaf and lemon verbena.” Bay leaf? Ick.

However, the pot de crème, which is a sort of thick, rich pudding, matches perfectly with the anise-y, bold taste of the bay leaf. It’s odd, but totally right.

Acclaimed by California Homes as one of the top six best pastry chefs in California and having been Stewart’s personal pastry chef for several years, Plue, thirtyish, is practically wizened in the world of pastry chefs, who often bail for greener pastures in bakeries (or home life) after a few years of 18-hour days.

So what’s an English major doing in chef’s whites? Like most cooks, Plue says she was always hanging out in the kitchen as a kid, making lumpy cakes and inedible desserts early on and working up to more elaborate meals. After a detour into the nonprofit sector, she ended up in cooking school. She decided on the pastry-chef route only after seeing a fellow pastry chef sitting at the bar, drinking wine at 4pm as the dinner chefs were racing to get ready for the crowd. That life, she said, was for her. Thinking back, she says, she’s never sat at a bar at 4pm. She’s always been too busy.

Which brings us to Martha. How does a girl end up as the personal pastry chef for Martha Stewart? Turns out it’s who you know–or, rather, who you work for. Plue was employed at a swanky New York eatery Stewart frequented with her celeb pals. After taping two baking segments on the show, Stewart asked Plue to come north and work in her kitchens permanently. There was no real job description, no real expectations other than being on set during all of the baking segments and knowing precisely how thick to roll dough. Plue grew bored, and eventually left to find new opportunities.

Not, she notes, due to any disagreement with Stewart, whom she found to be a very “hardworking and confident” woman. But, yes, Martha could have moments of, well, intensity. Like, say, asking her own mother to breathe a little less loudly during the taping of a Christmas special. Hey, nose whistling can be a real annoyance, especially during the holidays.

Sheesh. Someone needs to chill out and get naked in a vat of chocolate frosting.

Isn’t It Romantic?

Plue says the most romantic thing about dessert isn’t chocolate; it’s sharing a warm dessert. “I love things you have to eat together,” she says. Fondue is a special favorite, Plue loving how couples have to talk over the pot together. She plans a special Valentine’s menu that will feature two-part desserts for diners. Each person gets one part of the dessert and has to share it with the other. Delicious!

Julia’s Kitchen offers a special prix fixe Valentine’s dinner on Monday, Feb. 14, from 5:30pm to 9:30pm. While lobster, crab, ahi and beef illuminate the main menu, Plue offers a selection of rhubarb crêpes suzette with iced rhubarb parfait, dark chocolate millefeuille with café brûlot ice cream and bay fudge sauce, vanilla bean coeur à la crème with a trio of sorbets or artisinal cheeses for a velvet finish. At COPIA, 500 First St., Napa. $75 per person. 707.265.5700.

–H.I.

From the February 9-15, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Roadkill

Simply Sushi

By R. V. Scheide

Driving above the Santa Rosa Plain on the depressingly wide and straight Highway 101 superslab, we often find ourselves lamenting the demise of the Old Redwood Highway. By the early 1990s, that magnificent ribbon of two-lane roadway that once snaked through the redwoods and practically every center of commerce, large and small, from San Francisco to Crescent City, was practically paved out of existence by progress’ insatiable demand for efficiency. When the new freeway came in, entire city centers were bifurcated and sometimes outright bypassed, cut off from the vital, sustaining flow of four-wheeled commerce.

Consider the southern tip of the town of Healdsburg, snipped off like a bad hangnail by the mighty 101. We take the Central Healdsburg exit into town then hang a right on Healdsburg Avenue, which, if we drive south far enough, becomes what’s left of the Old Redwood Highway. It’s getting there that’s the problem. At the intersection marked by a Chevron station and a new McDonald’s, we are presented with a life-threatening choice. Veer to the right, and the road slingshots us onto southbound 101. Go to the left, and we wind up lost somewhere down by the river. Only the center path leads to what’s left of the old highway, but first we must remember to brake at the stop sign, lest we get creamed by the high-speed, northbound cross-traffic exiting off the freeway.

Yep, it’s a little risky getting to southern Healdsburg this way, but just a couple of blocks more and we reach Sushi Osaka, and Sushi Osaka is definitely worth the risk. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because for the last 15 years or so, chef and owner Tommy Yamaguchi’s Japanese restaurant was located on Highway 1 near the outskirts of Bodega Bay. The lease expired last February, so he moved his place inland, and while business started slow (getting here, as noted, can be a little tricky), he assures us that it’s “beginning to pick up.”

A native of Osaka, Japan, Yamaguchi labored in sushi restaurants at home and in the States for what he describes as “years and years” before opening his own place, developing a unique style that focuses on simplicity and tradition while still incorporating the latest tricks of the trade. We’ve recently marveled at such specialties as the “Punk Rock Roll”–unagi (barbecued freshwater eel) and crisp cucumber rolled up in nori and sticky rice, doused with eel sauce, cut into bite-sized slices and topped with black tobiko (flying fish roe). Dunk a colorful piece in a mixture of wasabi and soy sauce, and it’s spicy, crunchy, salty and sweet all at the same time.

Sushi Osaka is the kind of place we generally like to keep to ourselves, but situated as it is in this remote part of Healdsburg, it’s probably time the secret got out. “People in Bodega Bay miss my place,” Yamaguchi says. “They don’t know how to get here.”

They do now. For safety reasons, we suggest traveling north on Highway 101 and taking the first Healdsburg exit, which dumps you right out on Healdsburg Avenue, aka the Old Redwood Highway. Cross the bridge just down from Memorial Beach and drive a half-mile north. You can’t miss it.

Sushi Osaka, 48 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg. Open Monday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. 707.431.1381.

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talk About Terroir: The Ayme family of the Andes live mainly on the potatoes they grow, preferring to sell the sheep they raise rather than ‘waste’ the meat on themselves.

Food for Thought

‘What the World Eats’ exhibit something to chew on

By Gretchen Giles

Some 10 years ago, Napa photojournalists Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio traveled the world, struck up friendships with accommodating souls and then asked these newfound friends to do something awfully peculiar: entirely empty the contents of their homes so that their belongings could be photographed.Amazingly, scores of families agreed, resulting in Menzel and D’Aluisio’s 1994 book Material World. Deciding to revisit eight of the Material World families in 2001, the couple–who are married with four teenaged sons–struck upon a new idea. What if they were to identify, assemble and photograph all of the food that comprised each family’s weekly meals?

The result is shown in part at a new COPIA exhibit titled “What the World Eats.” Menzel and D’Aluisio will release a comprehensive coffee-table book on the subject, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, this fall. Traveling the globe from industrial France to far-flung Bhutan, from China to Berkeley, Cuba to India to Greenland to Japan, Kuwait, Poland and Texas, totaling 24 countries in all, the team met extensively with 30 willing families–in some cases living with them for over a week–prepared grocery lists and took them to the market, where they purchased seven days’ worth of typical foodstuffs.

Not surprisingly, the exhibit presents an overwhelming amount of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, KFC and McDonald’s, Purina and General Mills products in even the poorest Western homes. Rice, grains and corn are in great preponderance in Third World homes, meat being almost nonexistent. In considering these photographs, it occurs that the ability to acquire meat on a regular basis may be the most reliable indicator of worldwide wealth. Those in rich countries eat it daily; those in smaller countries can afford to splurge perhaps once a week.

Near each photo, Menzel and D’Aluisio list the ingredients displayed and their resulting cost in U. S. dollars. Ranging from just .91 cents per week for a large poor family in Africa to $400 for a well-fed family of four in Germany, the food shown goes from wholly fresh and natural–the original human diet–to cupboards and countertops flooded with only packaged foods, a clump of broccoli sometimes set indifferently to one side. The Japanese mania for packaging finds each of their bananas separately wrapped within the bunch, while families such as the Aymes of Ecuador (shown above) cut their own potatoes fresh from the ground. Speaking by phone from his Napa studio, Menzel reflects, “It isn’t really necessary to have a huge gourmet supermarket close by to feed your family well, nourish them and be content.”

Having produced a glossy book entirely devoted to the consumption of bugs (Man Eating Bugs: The Arts and Science of Eating Insects), Menzel and D’Aluisio are difficult to shock. Anything available and nourishing is suitable for their table and they enthusiastically shared meals with each of their 30 subject families. “There’s weird things that people eat,” Menzel shrugs, “but I’m pretty much inured to that. What’s pounded home all the time when you visit people and eat with them is how alike we all are.”

Reflecting on the two years of travel that it took him and D’Aluisio to complete their work for the book, Menzel chuckles. “This one was so much easier than the first book. Can you imagine a foreigner coming up to you and asking you to take everything out of your house?”

‘What the World Eats’ continues at COPIA through May 9. 500 First St., Napa. $7.50-$12.50. 707.259.1600.

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.