Title: Writer/Performer, currently appearing in I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify as a Cookie an interactive baking comedy
Hometown: Niagara-on-the-Lake (Canada) now San Francisco

1. How did you come up with the idea of baking onstage?
I had done stand-up for a long time and I was trying to figure out what to do with my hands for 90 minutes. I always found it comforting to bake. It’s relaxing and helps me get into the creative flow. Then it kept growing. Somewhere along the line I realized I could structure the stories with the recipe.

2. Where do the cookies served at the end of you show come from?
I bake all of them fresh the day of the show. For the integrity of the show I think it would be wrong not to. It’s very soothing and I rehearse the show that way. I would prefer to bake them all live. My original vision was to have 20 easy bake ovens, but you can only make so much with a light bulb! I almost did the show in a place that sells appliances with a wall of ovens.

3. What were meals like for you growing up?
The Friday night Shabbat salon dinners had a transformative effect on my life. Eating a meal once a week with 16 people is what helped keep our family together. It was the highlight of my life growing up. I made little shows for my family with my cousins. It’s the time when we were together, and sharing. My work is about sharing and connecting. I think food connects us. It’s a basic thing. It’s what I try to do in the show.

4. What are your favorite bakeries?
I love a good boulangerie or patisserie. I love the apricot danish at Nabolom Bakery in the East Bay. I used to go to the patisserie on California at Fillmore. I love the s’more thing at Citizen Cake.

5. What are the big differences between Canadians and Northern Californians?
There are a million Canadians living in Northern California, making it the third or fourth largest Canadian city. Canada is less urban. It’s super-expressive here. In Canada there is no first amendment. Canada is more culturally conservative, I mean in demeanor and temperament. Canadians don’t seem like crazy liberals the way people here do. No one wants to stick out. But there are a lot of similarities. Maybe fleece is the thing that holds the two places together?

Note: This run of “Cookie” at the Hotel Rex closes in April. There are two more shows left with Lewis Rossman of Cetrella as guest baker next Sunday and George Morrone (Tartare, Aqua, Fifth Floor) on Monday. Visit Subvert for ticket information.

Title: Owner, Juliet Mae, maker of The Occasional Gourmet a line of fine spices and herbs sold in recipe-friendly portions in stay-fresh packets
Hometown: New York, now San Francisco

1. How do New Yorkers compare to San Franciscans?
New Yorkers are specialists. But people here are interested in more things, and open to new ideas, more well-rounded. People out here are creative. I’m not sure I could have started this business in New York.

2. How did you come up with the idea for The Occasional Gourmet?
I was sitting in the kitchen one day looking at tea bags and I thought if people could buy individually foil wrapped tea bags, why not spices?

For coming up with blends, I’ll go out to eat and think about how someone prepared food or read cookbooks, figure out how another culture combines flavors. I like creating blends because they’re like culinary play dough. There are no limits to what you can do with them.

3. What are some great recipe tips from your customers?
One customer shared how she used a tagine blend with white beans, sausage and tomato sauce to create a kind of Mediterranean cassoulet. Another idea is to use herbs de Provence with a little white wine, chicken broth and some shallot or garlic to poach fish in the oven.

4. What trends do you predict in spices and flavorings?
A broadening appetite for spices, because of health reasons, cocooning, odd economic times, people may actually have to learn how to cook again.

Some people are looking to entertain and need solutions, other people use spices because they want to break out of the same old thing–but they all want them to be easy to use. Most people don’t want to spend all day preparing dinner. The real trend is people are cooking less at home so when they do, they want to make it special.

Spice usage has been increasing partly because Indian and Mexican cuisines are becoming more and more established. I see more fusion. People are more likely to combine flavors. North African spices will become more popular.

5. What are your favorite spices these days?
I like them all, but some of my favorites are a few Middle Eastern peppers, Marash, Aleppo, and piment d Espelette from the Espelette region in Basque country. The Marash is a finishing pepper. I also discovered using smoked paprika instead of chipotle.

Title: UC Davis Grad Student/Marine Scientist/Culinary Enthusiast/
Webmaster of Food Porn Watch, the ultimate food blog aggregator
(FPW updates which blogs have been published every hour, on the hour)
Home town: Baltimore now living in Sebastapol

1. How long has Food Porn Watch been running?
Since the Spring of 2004. The code is something I taught myself. I was reading Grub Report and learned about some other food blogs. That’s what inspired the site. Lately there has been an exponential growth in food and wine blogs, which is exciting. Food writing is a sensual adventure in words…

2. What do you cook for yourself at home?
Anything! I love to cook. No one specialty. Sometimes I hit a rut and just bake tarts or make things with coconut. In general, I cook lots of seafood. I also try to use what’s fresh from my garden.

Everyone in the lab is a foodie. I have to trudge 1/4 mile to get to one research site with my lab partner–and the thing that keeps us going is discussing what we’re going to cook for dinner. I surf blogs for dinner all the time.

3. Care to share any memorable meals inspired by blogs?
A rocket pesto from Chocolate & Zucchini. I had just gotten some nice looking jars, so I bought a ton of arugula and made the pesto.

One day after a long dive I remembered a post about a cherry tomato salsa for fish. I was at Lucas Wharf in Bodega Bay and I saw a gorgeous ling cod fillet. You’re not really supposed to eat it, but even for a marine scientist, it was too tempting. I’d just spent hours underwater looking at ling cod!

4. What’s the best thing about living in the Sonoma coast?
It’s a foodie paradise, gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful and a cornucopia of produce, wine, and cheese. It’s unbelievable, the best of all possible worlds. I love the great restaurants– like the Seaweed Cafe in Bodega Bay, and the small personal vineyards in this area.

5. What’s the weirdest blog you’ve come across?
Cooking for Engineers–having almost gone into Computer Science I’m attracted to the sheer geekery of it, it’s Alton Brown kicked up a notch.

Title: Pastry Chef, Restaurant Gary Danko
Home town: San Francisco

1. How did you become a pastry chef?
You know the happiness people get from good food? That’s what drew me to cooking.

I fell into pastry. I went to culinary school at City College but I didn’t learn too much about pastry there. I did savory first. But I’m a picky eater and I realized I can’t cook savory stuff if I can’t try it. I can eat a lot more sweets.

2. What are your favorite fruits?
Strawberries and lemons. I just love berries. Lemons are so versatile and such a flavor enchancer. I think strawberries go with everything–in breakfast items, in desserts, panna cotta, crepes, with chocolate…

3. If you could take one thing off every menu in America what would it be?
Warm chocolate cake is so played out. I see it on every menu now. But our clientele really likes rich chocolate. My ultimate dessert is basically chocolate chocolate chocolate. It’s three layers of chocolate–a rice crispy hazelnut base with chocolate ganache and a whipped cream lightened ganache mousse and a bittersweet chocolate sorbet.

4. What big trends do you see in desserts?
Deconstructed desserts. I saw one deconstructed dessert cake with a pile of cherries and alcohol on the side. But who wants to drink a shot of kirsch? It can only go so far if it’s just components.

Pastry here is about comfort. On the East Coast there are more components to dessert. Here a lot of people do a tart with ice cream but I would add one more component. My style is comfort redefined.

Another trend is fun desserts from childhood. For instance I make a PBJ, it’s a peanut butter mousse and jam, filo instead of bread and milk ice cream. It’s fun flavors. Lately I’ve been playing with the “got milk” idea. I’ll make something like milk foam or milk ice cream to go with rich foods.

On the menu right now I like the lemon souffle cake with raspberry swirl ice cream. Lemon souffle cake is getting to be common, but it’s so good. Lemon pudding cake or fallen souffle cake–it’s like the new molten chocolate cake.

5. What do your order when you go out to breakfast, sweet or savory?
Breakfast is my favorite meal. I always like to order sweets. I’ll order french toast, pancakes, waffles. I don’t really like eggs.

When dining, I’ll order 2 or 3 desserts. Crepes, anything with berries, citrusy fruits, I like panna cotta a lot. Delfina makes a good one. Panna cotta makes me really happy.

Two of my favorite chiles to cook with are chipotle and smoked paprika. Perhaps the reason I love the smoky flavor they impart is that I am longing for days when my ancestors cooked their food over an open flame. Or maybe living in a city apartment I just miss a good barbecue now and then.

Both chipotle and smoked paprika start out as fresh chiles and then are dried and smoked. They each have emulsifying and thickening properties which make them wonderful for stews and braises.

Chipotle chiles start out as jalapenos but when smoked they change their name. Chil refers to the “pepper” and potle is derived from poctli, meaning smoked in the language of the Aztecs. They are grown and processed in the US and Mexico.

Paprika comes from Hungary and Spain but is also produced in Turkey, and the US. Generally Hungarian paprika is considered better quality than Spanish paprika, though Spaniards will probably disagree. In Hungary it is famously used in goulash and paprikash. But perhaps the most desirable paprika of all is smoked paprika which comes from La Vera in Spain. It can be “sweet”, semisweet or hot and uses the pimenton or pimento chiles which are dried and smoked for about two weeks over oak embers.

Both chipotle powder and smoked paprika will lose their flavor over time. Only a buy a little and don’t keep it longer than two years. You can find good quality chipotle and smoked paprika at most gourmet shops. If you haven’t tried using these spices think of them as your new “secret ingredient”. Add a pinch to your favorite recipes to really jazz them up. Some of my favorite ways to use either smoked paprika or chipotle are in:

* Barbecue sauces
* Chili
* Mayonnaise
* Risotto
* Deviled eggs
* Roast chicken
* Soups, especially Spanish garlic soup

Warm weather the past few weeks may have fooled you into thinking we were heading into Spring. But get real, it’s February! A few nice days don’t mean the end of Winter. As long as we have to suffer through rain and cold, at least we can turn to the kitchen to take the chill off. Or in this case, the flame at the table. Cheese fondue is a perfect warm-you-up dish. It’s also a very social way to dine whether you are having friends over or entertaining that one special person.

Cheese fondue is one of those dishes like hollandaise sauce, ravioli, souffle–once you make it correctly you feel a tremendous amount of satisfaction. So don’t let fondue scare you. It’s actually fun to make once you get a hang of it. And just like mayonnaise or hollandaise there are things you can do to save it if it starts to go terribly wrong.

When you think about it, it really is a feat of chemistry in the first place. A pot of wine, with melted cheese that turns into the ultimate cheese sauce or dip. The reason it works, is all based on the wine (or cider). The tartaric acid unbinds the proteins in the cheese allowing it to combine with the liquid, which is mostly water. The water in wine keeps the casein proteins in the cheese moist.

The great fear of course, is that the cheese will seize up and turn gloppy, There are a couple of things you can do to prevent this–one is to use a bit of starch, either three tablespoons of flour or about a tablespoon of cornstarch as “insurance” and the other is to have some lemon juice on hand. In case your cheese does start to seize up, add a couple drops of lemon juice and the acidity will unbind the protein. Aficionados also suggest when adding the cheese to the wine that you stir it in bit by bit, using a figure-eight or zig-zag motion rather than circular pattern to prevent the cheese from balling up.

Don’t feel constricted to the traditional Gruyere and Emmental version. Even in Switzerland there are lots of variations using many different cheeses. Most cities and cantons in Switzerland have their own version of fondue, there are also French, Italian and Dutch versions…Here are some to consider.

Fribourg
Gruyere is mixed with Vacherin Fribourgeois, or Freiburger Vacherin (which you may or may not be able to find since these are raw milk cheeses)

Geneva
Walliser Bergkase is added to the more common Gruyere and Emmental. May include chopped morels

Glarus
Gruyere and Schabzieger are added to a roux of butter, flour and milk

Eastern Switzerland
Appenzeller and Vacherin cheeses are combined with dry cider

Vaud
Chopped garlic is added to the Gruyere

Neuchatel
Uses Neuchatel wine

Jura (France)
Uses Comte cheese

Val d’Aosta (Italy)
Fontina with egg yolks, milk, butter, flour and shaved white truffle

KaasDoop (Holland)
Gouda, milk and brandy

Here are a few more cheeses you can try in fondue, Beaufort, Tete de Moine, or Hoch Ybrig. Experiment and come up with your own personal blend based on the cheeses you like, mine is one part Gruyere, one part Emmental and 1/2 part Appenzeller.

My last tip is even when making cheese fondue for two, make enough for four. The leftovers are wonderful over toast or to add to a vegetable soup. Too little fondue in the pot will make it harder to dip and dipping is the name of the game. If you don’t have a recipe, here’s a link to a tried and true version.

I don’t drink coffee. Can’t really; it makes my heart go pitter patter, but not in a good way. I do drink other hot beverages primarily tea and hot chocolate. Finding a good cup of hot tea is not so challenging but finding good hot chocolate is another story.

Case in point. The other day I stopped by a coffee spot on Market Street. The menu had both hot chocolate and hot cocoa. Did they really have both I asked? No, the proprietor said as he smiled and shook a packet of Swiss Miss in my general direction.

Hot chocolate is not actually the same as hot cocoa. Here is how cocoa powder is made: the beans from the cacao tree are processed and the cocoa butter is extracted leaving what is called the chocolate liquor (not alcoholic) this is dried and powdered and becomes cocoa powder. Cocoa mix or instant cocoa is a combination of cocoa powder, sugar, some powdered milk and maybe some flavorings. What is it missing? In both the cocoa powder and the cocoa mix, there is no cocoa butter. A critical ingredient. In a chocolate bar it’s the cocoa butter that makes it rich and gives that distinctive mouth feel.

You can get amazingly good hot chocolate in Paris (visit Chez Pim for a listing of great places to find it) Here in San Francisco it is a little bit more challenging to find a great cup of chocolate but a couple of places are worth mentioning.

My two top picks for divine hot chocolate (not cocoa!)

Cafe Madeleine
43 O’Farrell Street @ Market Street
300 California Street @ Battery Street
Here they make hot chocolate from ganache, a rich combination of semisweet chocolate and heavy cream. It is used to fill and frost cakes or melted into a cup of milk for hot chocolate.

CocoaBella
2102 Union St @ Webster
A graduate of the local culinary academy developed several decadent hot chocolates including hot lava and a peppermint version.

One of the latest books to get cooks excited is not a cookbook. Not exactly. It’s an updated version of Bay Area local Harold McGee’s groundbreaking book, On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. The new version has been revised and updated, twenty years after originally published.

This book has long been a favorite of professional chefs in part because it is easily digested, making food science accessible and practical. After training and a vocation in physics and astronomy, McGee came back down to earth, first teaching literature then writing a book on the most practical science, that of the kitchen. Stanford and Berkeley Universities may be filled with Noble prize winning scientists, but McGee is surely the most popular scientist among cooks.

While professional chefs are innovating, home cooks may simply be trying to perfect a favorite recipe. Curious about the history of chocolate or how to more safely prepare a rare hamburger? Want to know the five different techniques for making hollandaise sauce? McGee is your go to guy. Not just a book about science, there is plenty of history and tips and health information to feed your hunger for knowledge. It may just be the ultimate kitchen resource book.

Click here to hear Michael Krasny’s interview with Harold McGee that aired on Forum last month.