Chicago Dogs at AT&T Park

A few months ago, a case of sport peppers arrived at my co-worker's desk.  Why? Because he loves Chicago-style hot dogs, and the peppers are an essential component.  He couldn't find them anywhere, so he had to get an entire case online.  Like ya do.

Now, I may be a bit of a food snob, but from time to time, I really can enjoy a good hot dog. But I'd never heard of a Chicago-style dog before.  I'm not really sure how, I guess perhaps because I've never been to Chicago? Or perhaps because, although I do enjoy a hot dog from time to time, it isn't something I would order out, more just something I'd get at a BBQ?

Anyway, we were recently at AT&T Park, and all of us arrived with slightly different agendas, although amusingly, none of us were there to see the game (this was a team offsite event).  I was there to try the crab sandwiches that I'd read so much about.  Emil was there to drink and be social.  And my sports pepper buying co-worker was certainly there to get a Chicago dog.  His enthusiasm for these dogs spread, so somehow, even though the rest of us were stuffed with crab and garlic fries, Chicago-style dogs were had.

I think only one stand in the entire park sells them, although you can get a regular hotdog or brat at pretty much every stand.  He got a bit worried when the first few places we stopped at did not have Chicago-style, and when I said I hadn't seen them anywhere (I had of course already scooped out all of the options, but admittedly, I wasn't looking for hot dogs in particular), but we searched until we found them.

Chicago Dog, extra peppers.  $7.

Since this was the first Chicago-style hot dog I'd ever seen, I had no idea if this was authentic or not.  My co-worker seemed to think it was a decent representation.

A pretty standard hot dog, but it was the toppings that make it something different.  Alongside the dog was a full pickle spear.  Ok, now that is strange.  A pickle on the side I'm used to, but inside the bun? And wedges of tomato.  On a hot dog?  It was topped with mustard and chopped onion, which are pretty normal, but also some crazy florescent green relish.  My co-worker assured me that the insane color of the relish was part of the experience.  It was also sprinkled with salt and pepper.  I was instructed not to add ketchup.  We ordered them his way, which included extra peppers.  Not sure how many come on normally, but ours each came with 5.  He clearly loves the peppers.

This thing was a crazy mess to eat.  The bun broke apart within the first bite or so, due to being absolutely stuffed full of toppings.  It was a regular bun, designed to hold just a dog and perhaps some ketchup, and totally couldn't handle the ridiculous amount of stuff in it.  I wonder if they normally use bigger buns?

None of the components were particularly good quality.  Very plain bun, although it did have poppy seeds on it.  Standard hot dog.  Generic pickle.  Barely ripe tomato.  Basic onion, mustard, relish. Slimy but spicy peppers.  All together they created some interesting flavors, but this isn't how I'd choose to eat a hot dog.

For $7, this was by far the best value we saw all day.  Even the basket of garlic fries cost more.  But, not something I'd get again.  The others seemed to enjoy theirs though.

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Gilroy Garlic Fries at AT&T Park

Some people go to AT&T Park to watch the ballgame.  Ok, fine, most probably do.  But I really don't care about baseball.  I do however care about delicious things.

My first outing to the ballpark thus started with the item that everyone claims is the best thing to eat at the park: the Crazy Crab sandwich.  Then I moved onto a disappointing dessert-like beverage.  Once it was time for more savory food, my research easily pointed me at the next thing to try: the garlic fries.

Scattered throughout the park are numerous Gilroy Garlic Fries stands.  They all had pretty long lines.  From casual observation, it really did seem like more than half the people I saw with food had garlic fries.  And the aroma was pretty hard to resist.  I had to try them!

Garlic Fries.  $7.75.

Like everything else served at the ballpark, they were not fresh, baskets were already prepared and sitting under heat lamps.  Sigh.  The park was crowded, so I know throughput was kinda high, but still.  Grumble.

They were served in a basket, which was then placed into a drink holder container.  An assortment of basic Heinz condiments were available from dispensers in the center of the food stand area: ketchup, mustard, relish, bbq sauce, ranch, and mayo.  No little containers were provided though, so you could basically only just dump into onto your fries, rather than have a vessel to dunk into.  I wanted to try all the sauces, and didn't know how much sauce I'd want, as the garlic fries might be flavorful enough on their own to not really require much, so this made me grumpy.  I tried to squirt different sauces around the perimeter of the cardboard drink holder thing, but as it had holes in it, this didn't work well.  I'm still not sure why they came in that strange holder in the first place, as the basket really wasn't designed to fit in there.  Anyway.

As I expected, the fries were lukewarm and pretty limp and soggy.  They weren't particularly good.  The bites I had with garlic were better, but there was far less garlic than I expected, and it wasn't well distributed.  For sauces, I liked the ranch the best, but all were very mediocre standard Heinz.  The BBQ was notable in how watery and flavorless it was.

They came with 2 mints on the side, a cute touch, presumably to deal with the garlic breath :)

And, like many things at the park, the price.  $7.75 for a basket of fries? Meh.  It was a large basket, but I wish they offered a smaller size, since I wanted my crab sandwich, fries, and some sweet treats too!  Would not get again. One of the other stands also sold garlic fries, not with the "Gilroy Garlic" label, but perhaps they were better?

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Les Elements Patisserie

This review is a two for one special: a cooking demo AND some baked goods!

First, we start with the demo, which took place at the Ferry Building Saturday market.

Chef Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie was the guest chef.  I recognized him immediately, as he sells pastries at the market on Saturdays and Thursdays, and most recently, bread on Tuesdays as well.  I've enjoyed some of his chocolate chip cookies and very creative scones in the past (always made with unique flavors, with even more unique glazes on top!).

He is also currently working as a consultant at La Victoria Mexican Bakery in the Mission, where he got the inspiration for the dish he was presenting, a chamomile-goat milk tea with cinnamon crisp and caramelized yellow peaches.  He explained that in Mexico there is very little cow milk available, and that families have their own goats instead, and so he uses goat milk in this recipe.  It also has a lot more flavor than cow's milk.  His work at La Victoria is on modernizing their menu, while still keeping it fairly traditional.  He is also bringing in higher end ingredients.

His demo was very informative, and he taught us a number of tips, like how we could make the cookie portion of this dish in advance since it was a thin, hard style and would keep ok.  He also stressed the importance of measurements and weighing in the pastry world, and how pastry is very unlike savory cooking, in that it is about precision, not about just going with what you feel.   He is clearly a methodical, calm chef, and mentioned how it is important to him to take lots of notes, how he constantly is refining his recipes, and always cooks with a clean station.  He was also incredibly knowledgeable, and taught us about some of the chemistry behind his work, like how food processors break up the gluten structures in dough, how the fat content of goat's milk makes it so we don't need to add cream, and how, due to the high calcium levels, we could sprinkle the fruit with pectin if we needed to cut it up in advance, and this would help protect it and cause it to not break down.

 Chamomile-goat milk tea with cinnamon crisp and caramelized yellow peaches.

The milk was nicely sweet, with a subtle chamomile undertone, but as I don't particularly care for goat milk, it had more goat flavor than I like.  If you like goat milk however, this was probably pretty good.

On top was crumbled crisp cookies and the caramelized peach.  The peach was really well executed, softened but not mushy, and the caramel flavor to the glaze was really delicious and complimented the peach well.

This was a rather odd dish however, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.  Do you drink it?  Spoon it?  It was somewhat like the end of a bowl of cereal, where you have flavorful sweet milk and some little crumbly bits of cereal left.  Enjoyable, but definitely different.

Tierra Farms Cornmeal Ciabatta Roll.  $0.75.

Les Elements recently started offering breads at the market on Tuesdays only, so I decided to try one out.  I went for the small sized cornmeal roll.  But ... I think it had a sourdough base, and being a horrible San Franciscan, I just can't stand sourdough.  I did like the texture from the cornmeal and the heartiness to it.  It had a good crust on the outside.

I mostly didn't quite know what to do with this roll.  Cold, it was just a roll, unremarkable.  I warmed it in the toaster oven, and liked it much more, but it was still just a roll.  I tried it with some butter, with some strawberry jam, and even made a mini pb & j.  None quite seemed right, although the butter was the best.

$0.75 was a good price for a roll, and I appreciate that they sell single rolls, rather that requiring me to buy a dozen at a time.

[ Not Pictured ]

Cardamon Oatmeal Cookie. $1.75.

The cookie had an interesting flavor from the cardamon, but I didn’t really like it.  It had a nice heartiness, but was a hard style cookie, which I just don’t care for.

I've also really enjoyed their scones in the past, but unfortunately, do not have any notes from those.  I used to get them from the market on Tuesday mornings every time I had an afternoon flight, and they were the perfect treat on the plane later in the day :)

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Murph's Irish Pub at AT&T Park

As I mentioned last week, I recently attended my first Giant's game.  Being in San Francisco, it was of course not exactly warm.  My friends assured me that after a bit of alcohol I'd stop caring about how cold it was, but in the meantime, I decided to start with a warm drink.  I saw many stands offering Irish Coffee, which sounded perfect, except that none had decaf, and I try not to have caffeine later in the day.  The regular coffee stands had decaf, but no booze.  I was trying to kill two birds with one stone, so just drinking a plain decaf wasn't what I was going for.

When I struck out at the last stand advertising irish coffee, I noticed that they also had hot chocolate with Bailey's.  Still more caffeine than I really wanted, but a decent compromise.  Side note: they also had better looking fish & chips than what I'd seen at the other stands (still already laid out in baskets under heat lamps, but less limp looking than the others I'd seen).  If I wasn't totally full of crab at that point, I probably would have tried the fish & chips too, as I've been craving fish & chips pretty much nonstop since my last visit to the east coast, and I still haven't found anywhere around that I like.  Not that I'd really expect these not-fresh ones to be great.  Anyway.  Back to the drink.

Hot Chocolate with Bailey's and Whipped Cream.  $11.50.

The hot chocolate came in a fairly fancy looking, albeit plastic, cup.  I was expecting a paper cup, so this was a nicer presentation.

The hot chocolate came out of one of those automatic machines.  I wish I'd realized that before I ordered.  It was watery, lukewarm, and not really chocolatey.  It was brown, but had no flavor.  I guess I didn't need to worry about the caffeine content after all.  And I didn't taste any Bailey's.  The whipped cream was generic and came out of a can.

This was so meh.  As it was barely warm, it certainly didn't serve to warm me up in any way, which is why I got it in the first place.   I don't know how it had so little flavor, seriously, all I tasted was slightly sweet water.  For $11.50 it was incredibly disappointing.  Certainly wouldn't get again.

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Jelly Belly

I normally review only chocolate on Sundays, but I wanted to expand my horizons a bit this week, and move on to regular candy.  You know, flavored sugar.

I don't normally go out and purchase candy, but I gladly eat it.  And luckily for me, my mother likes to throw this sort of thing into gift boxes and Christmas stockings, so I get plenty.

I know it is just flavored sugar, but I do love things like jelly beans, gummy candy, and sour straws.  My multivitamins are the gummy kind, and I look forward to vitamin time every day :)  So it shouldn't be a surprise that I have strong opinions about the quality of my flavored sugar!

Jelly Belly is probably the most popular jellybean manufacturer in the US.  They make 50 flavors, ranging from the standard ones, to sour ones, to the dreadful buttered popcorn.  If you've ever had Jelly Belly, you know what I'm talking about.  It is the flavor that ensures that you never eat a bag of these in a dark room, or absent-mindedly just dip your hand in.  Shutter.

The rest range from nicely flavored to kinda boring.  I'll eat them, but I don't love them.  The size is just too small for my taste, I want more to bite into. They also make me grumpy with their flavor distribution in a bag.  If a bag has say 10 flavors, and 50 beans, I don't necessarily expect a perfect uniform distribution of 5 of each, but having 25 buttered popcorn and only 1 raspberry is just not right! (ok, maybe I exaggerated the % of buttered popcorn just a bit ... ]

• Berry Blue: Sweet, sorta that fake blue raspberry flavor I remember from slush puppies growing up, not like a real fruit, but not bad.
• Blueberry: Ok, not as flavorful as I recall [ Gross actually ] [ Not much flavor at all, not sweet, not tart, not fruity, just there. ]
• Bubble Gum: GROSS. [ Sweet, not a ton of flavor, the tutti frutti were much more bubble gum flavored to me. ]
• Buttered Popcorn: Probably their most famous flavor, as it is totally disgusting.  But damn, it sure does taste like buttered popcorn!  My least favorite flavor, always.
• Cappuccino: yup, super coffee flavor
• Cherry: Very sweet
• Chocolate Pudding: Ok, wow.  Yes, that tastes like chocolate pudding.  Well, like chocolate pudding from a plastic container.  Do not like, at all.
• Coconut: Decent coconut flavor [ Decent coconut flavor, reminds me of sunscreen though ... ]
• Cotton Candy: Pretty sweet, ok. [ Mostly just sweet, no real distinguishable flavor. ] [ No strong flavor, had a hard time figuing out what flavor this was. ]
• Dark Chocolate Covered Raspberry Beans: low quality dark chocolate around the jelly beans.  Sorta like a choco gummy, except not tasty.  Would not get again.
• Dr Pepper: I'm not really not familiar with dr pepper but I think these were similar
• Green Apple: Mostly just sweet, with a tiny bit of apple juice flavor in the finish.  Not bad, but not good.
• Juicy Pear: awful, horrible, horrible flavor, not pear like at all
• Lemon: very fake tasting
• Lemon Lime: This tastes exactly like Sprite! Very sweet.  A bit tangy.  Not bad.
• Licorice: not bad!  tastes like licorice!
• Orange: decent orange flavor.
• Orange Sherbet: This did taste like sherbet.  It had a creaminess to it.  But not a ton of orange flavor.
• Peach: NOMS [ NOMS] [ Not liking this these days ... ] [ Sweet, fake peach tasting, not that great. ]
• Raspberry: Nice berry flavor, not too sweet.  I liked this one.  Unfortunately, my giant bag has only one!!! of these. 
• Red Apple: About the same as the green apple.  Sorta tasted liked apple juice, not a real apple.  Meh.
• Root Beer: yup, tastes like root beer.
• Strawberry Cheesecake: Don’t really get the strawberry cheesecake flavor.
• Strawberry Jam: Pretty tasty.  Decent jammy flavor.
• Sour Apple: Nice sourness!  And sweet.  Pretty good.  Could have been even more sour, but one of the better flavors.
• Sour Cherry: My bag was supposed to have some of these in it, but I never found any.  Perhaps I couldn't distinguish from the Very Cherry?
• Sunkist Lemon: Kinda tangy lemon flavor.  Kinda unremarkable.
• Toasted Marshmallow: yup, tastes like a sweet marshmallow. [ Wow, these really taste remarkably like a marshmallow! ] [ Definitely a marshmallow.  Good flavor, but I'd prefer to just eat a marshmallow ]
• Top Banana: yup, banana
• Tutti-Fruiti: so fake, like bubble gum. [ There is another flavor called bubble gum, but this tasted like bubble gum to me.  Didn't really like. ]
• Very Cherry: These taste like cold medicine.  Well, obviously, the cherry flavored kind.  Do not like at all.

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Cookies from Cupcake Cove

If you read the title of this post, you may be confused.  "Cookies from Cupcake Cove" ... why isn't she getting the cupcakes?  There are several reasons for that.  One, is that they only seed their LevelUp account with $2, which can purchase a cookie, but not a cupcake, and I've been enjoying the game of making my first purchase at an establishment be to only spend the seed money, to see if they are worthy of my real cash.  But, the real reason, is that the cupcakes just do not get good reviews.  And I'm a bit of a cupcake snob, so somewhere that doesn't get good reviews just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Cupcake Cove is a tiny little shop in the FiDi, open only during the week.  I've tried to stop by and get cookies a number of times, but they were always sold out when I visited during the afternoon, on my way back from the Crocker Galleria Farmer's Market.  So, I finally went to the market in the morning, and went to Cupcake Cove right at 11am.  I had almost the opposite problem this time; they told me that the cookies weren't quite ready, as they were just coming out of the oven and would be too hot!  Hmm, a hot fresh cookie isn't something they can serve me?  I looked a little puzzled, but asked when they'd be ready.  They said they were sorta ready, just too hot.  I said I didn't mind, in fact, a hot fresh cookie sounded great to me.  One of the workers agreed.  So, I got my pick of cookie, fresh out of the oven!

When I went to pay with LevelUp, they had the same problem that so many places I've been to recently had: the phone wasn't plugged in, and was dead.  It has been really interesting to see how different businesses deal with this.  Fresco Pizza and Shwarma got grumpy, demanded that I use cash instead, and eventually just told me to take my falafel and go.  They were rude and very upset that I was using LevelUp.  Back Yard Kitchen apologized and quickly plugged it in and booted it up.  Cupcake Cove was also very apologetic about it, and told me that since it was their fault the phone wasn't plugged in, I should just take the cookie.  I offered to wait a few minutes, or come back with my phone later, but they said not to worry about it and apologized again.  Such better service!

Ginger Cookie.  $1.75.

Served fresh out of the oven!  It was warm, moist, almost cake-like.  A large size.  There was some ginger flavor, but it wasn't anything spectacular.  I appreciated it for its freshness, but besides that, there wasn't much remarkable here.  The ginger cookie from L'Anjou was a zillion times better!

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Catering by Bluestem Brasserie

I've been to Bluestem Brasserie twice, but never for a full meal.  I've just gone to sit in the bar/lounge area, mostly for desserts.  The desserts always sound (and look) incredible, and I've read amazing things about them, and you know what a dessert girl I am!  But unfortunately, I didn't really love any that I tried.

Given my lackluster dessert experiences, I haven't been compelled to go back to Bluestem since those first two visits, although I have a friend who swears by their brunch.  However, they were catering at an event I was at, so I got to try out some of their savory offerings.  Now, I know that catering is rarely something that comes out that well.  They are not working out of a real kitchen, trying to feed masses at once, etc.  I didn't have that high of expectations, but even so, I liked it less than I expected.

The staff however were great, dealing with the insane swarm of people that would come crashing in whenever they showed up with a new platter of food.  They did it all politely and with a smile, which is more than I can say for myself, as I got literally got crushed by a mass of crazy people, acting like this was the first food they'd seen in days.  I certainly threw some dirty looks.  It isn't like they just pushed me, or threw elbows, they literally crushed me!  Anyway, not Bluestem's fault, but I didn't care for their offerings.  Certainly not worth getting trampled over :)

"Miami-Style Cuban Sandwich". 

First up was a mini Cuban, roasted pork, ham, gruyere, house-cured pickles, dijon, on house-made Cuban Bread.

I'm not entirely sure what makes it "Miami-style", as that sounds like a regular Cuban to me!  They serve this on their regular lunch menu at the restaurant.

The bread I really did not like.  It was incredibly plain.  It did have lovely grill marks, but absolutely no flavor, and a slightly strange texture.  The ham and pork were both fine, but not particularly flavorful.  The cheese was nicely melted.  I didn't really taste any dijon.

So far, very, very mediocre.  The saving grace: the pickle slice!  I'd gladly eat a plate of their pickles, but I wouldn't ever order this sandwich.

Sweet Fried Plantain.

I love fried plantains.  I almost even joined in the crushing masses to get one.

But they weren't very good.  Oily, soggy, flavorless.   I'm sure some of the issue is that they were being served as catering.  Maybe fried offsite?  And I have no idea what the cream was on top.

I would not get these again.  Bluestem serves them as a side with the Cuban sandwich when you get it for lunch at the restaurant.

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