Quince-a-nera

One of the coolest things about my little house in Oakland is that it came with a quince tree. Some of you may be wondering what the heck a quince is (besides, obviously, a fruit). Quince looks very similar to a small yellow-green apple, but unlike your garden variety Golden Delicious, it's not a juicy, tasty treat eaten right off the tree. It is, in fact, inedible raw - unless you happen to like cottony-textured, astringent fruit. Once cooked, the character of the fruit completely changes - from super-tart to pretty mellow, and very similar in texture to cooked pears. And because quince is a member of the rose family (Rosaceae), it gives off the the slight aroma of rose petals when being cooked.

For the first few years I lived here, I didn't appreciate the quince tree for how cool it is. I even considered cutting it down and replacing it with something more 'useful,' like an apple tree. I couldn't really understand why the guy who lived here before me even planted it. I mean, it's not a very common fruit. Have you ever gone into a grocery store or a farmer's market and seen piles of quince for sale? When you go to the bakery and look at all the yummy seasonal fruit pastries, have you ever seen a quince turnover sitting next to the apple and peach ones? I didn't think so. Sometimes restaurants on the higher scale of things offer quince (most often as a tart) on the dessert menu, and there's a very well-regarded and pricey restaurant in San Francisco named Quince, but other than that, it's languished in relative obscurity.

But it's because of its obscurity that convinced me to keep the quince tree around. I knew as soon as I cut it down, quince would become incredibly trendy and I would be besieged with quince recipes I would want to try but I wouldn't be able to find the fruit anywhere. And then I would really kick myself for cutting down the tree right before it got popular. OK, that hasn't really happened, but that's because I didn't cut the tree down. I know for sure it would have if I did.

One of the cool things about making jam from quince is that, because of the high pectin content in the fruit, you can actually make jelly out of the water you boil the fruit in. This makes it the perfect fruit for me because I'm a sucker for a good deal, and I have a hard time resisting two-for-the-price-of-one. (Even though the 'one' didn't cost me anything in the first place.) Last year, though, we never got around to making the jelly because someone who shall remain nameless drank the leftover quince water before we had a chance. I can't hardly blame him though, because the quince water is slightly syrupy and has the faint taste of roses. In other words, pretty damn yummy.



This year, not only did the water survive long enough to be turned into jelly, we also made quince paste. Also known by its Spanish name, membrillo, quince paste can be found in specialty grocery stores and is most commonly paired with Manchego. Membrillo is made pretty much the same way jam is - peel, core, slice fruit, boil, puree, add sugar and cook down. But after the cooking down on the stove, it goes in the oven for even more cooking down, resulting in a very concentrated block of quince goodness.

When it came time for holiday baking this year, we wanted to incorporate the quince paste into the process. I looked up some jam cookie recipes, most of which call for raspberry or apricot jam, figuring quince would be a good substitute. It took us several attempts to get exactly what we were looking for.

The first recipe we tried was Oatmeal Raspberry (Quince) Bars. They came out kind of like a Nature Valley granola bar with quince filling - very oaty and crunchy. I liked it, but Mark, who favors a softer cookie as opposed to a crispy one, wasn't particularly a fan. Next up, we tried a Thumbprint cookie, which was OK, but the cookie part was kind of bland and the quince not sweet enough to make up for it. A dusting of powdered sugar kicked the sweetness up a notch and improved them quite a bit. With the extra sugar, they were good but not the exact perfect thing.

Our third try was the charm. We adapted a recipe called Apricot Crumbles, which is a bar cookie like the Oatmeal Raspberry Bars, but with a butter/flour/sugar topping instead of oats. They were just the ticket. The pastry part was buttery but simple, and really allowed the quince to shine. Sadly, the recipe only makes an 8x8 pan - so we had to cut them into really small pieces and they were gone before we knew it. At least next year, we'll know what to do with our quince paste. And maybe if you received some quince jam from us this year and you're wondering what the heck to do with it, you can try it too.

Quince Crumbles

Ingredients

* 2 sticks unsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/3 cup granulated sugar
* 1/4 cup light brown sugar
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 egg yolk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 3/4 cup quince paste or jam

Directions

1. Heat oven to 375° F. Coat an 8-inch square baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter.
2. In a food processor, combine the flour, granulated and light brown sugars, baking powder, and salt. Pulse to combine. Add the remaining butter and pulse until crumbly. Add the egg yolk and vanilla and pulse until the mixture just comes together but is still crumbly.
3. Transfer 1/2 cup of the dough to a small bowl or cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Use your fingertips to press the remaining dough evenly into the baking dish, pushing the dough up about 1/4 inch around the edge.
4. Spread the jam evenly over the crust. Crumble the remaining refrigerated dough over the top. Bake until golden, about 35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes before cutting.

The Pizza Philes, chapter 2 - Howie's Artisan Pizza, Palo Alto

As a pizzaphile, I'm always keeping an eye out for new pizza joints that pop up on the landscape. Last week I read in the Chronicle about a newcomer to the scene on the Peninsula - Howie's Artisan Pizza in Palo Alto. We weren't sure exactly when we would be able to make it down there since it's not exactly close by. But as fate would have it, a few days later a friend was celebrating her birthday in San Jose which would put us within striking distance, so we jumped at the chance to check it out.

Howie's Artisan Pizza is the brainchild of Howie Bulka, former chef/owner of Marche, an acclaimed fine-dining restaurant in Menlo Park. According to the HAP press release, Bulka wanted to create a casual family-friendly environment where parents can bring their kids and also enjoy good food made with quality ingredients at a reasonable price. Judging by the number of families at Howie's on Friday night, he seems to have succeeded at this goal.

Howie's is located in the Town and Country Village, a strip mall near the Stanford campus. Although the mall doesn't look like it's been renovated since it was built in (I'm guessing) the 1970's, the restaurant space was completely gutted and redone. The design is well-thought out and creates exactly the kind of vibe Bulka wanted: a cross between casual and stylish. Howie's whimsical logo - a big red splat, presumably of tomato sauce - plus the playful font of the signage and menu speak to the family-friendliness that Bulka was going for, while touches like the exposed beam ceiling, bamboo counters with brass inlays and retro lighting fixtures give the impression of a more sophisticated restaurant than your average family pizza joint, a la Round Table. The most impressive style elements are the amber-colored glass panels that separate the dining area and the bar. They get their color because they're filled with olive oil. It's a really cool detail - which I didn't find out about until doing on-line research for this blog post. I'm disappointed I didn't know about the panels before going there - I would have paid them more attention. You have to wonder if the coolness factor of having olive oil-filled glass panel dividers is negated by the fact that no one knows they exist (unless they read the press release or Carolyn Jung's Food Gal blog). Then again, it's not like they're going to post a sign on the panels saying, 'hey, look at me! I'm filled with olive oil! Isn't that cool?'so I guess it's best as one of those secret little details that people somehow find out about by chance. Or not.



Anyway, enough about the space...let's get to the food. We started out with a couple of appetizers, an olive oil sampling and the eggplant pillows. The olive oil taster came with two different types of oil, thinly sliced toasts, something called dukkah (which I later found out through the magic of Wikipedia is an "Egyptian dry mixture of chopped nuts, seeds and Middle Eastern spices and flavors" usually eaten with bread that's been dipped in olive oil) and shaved parmesan. Maybe it's just that I'm spoiled in that my only other restaurant olive oil tasting experience was at Bar Bambino in San Francisco, which gave you three different oils to try, but I could barely tell the difference between these two. They were both grassy and one was slightly more spicy than the other. They were both tasty, but did not really hold my interest for long.



The eggplant pillows consisted of roasted eggplant wrapped around ricotta and sun-dried tomatoes and covered in chopped garlic and basil oil. The presentation was beautiful and they were aptly named: they were melt-in-your-mouth soft and pillowy bites of eggplant goodness. Surprisingly though, it was somewhat lacking in the flavor department given all that garlic. A little bit of salt went a long way in waking up the flavors.

On to the main event: the pizza. Howie says his pizza is "inspired" by the New Haven style, which according to Slice (the definitive pizza blog) is "cooked in a coal oven, has a very crisp crust that is thin but still typically thicker than New York pizzas. Marked by a characteristic oblong shape, often served on a sheet of waxed paper atop a plastic cafeteria tray." (Doesn't sound that appealing, does it?) Well, Howie's pizza doesn't come on the wax paper or the plastic cafeteria tray, thank goodness, nor is it oblong. Nor is it cooked in a coal oven. So what we have here is a round thin crust pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven...which sounds like a Neapolitan to me, but Howie's pizza definitely has a thicker crust than an Neapolitan, which I guess is what makes it New Haven "inspired." I am a crust person. It's my favorite part of any pizza, and the crust is actually what makes this pizza for me. It's puffy and blistered and charred and bready on the edges and wafer-thin in the middle, just how I like it. For all of the artisan-style pizza we eat, sometimes Mark gets a craving for a good old fashioned 'chain store' one. I understand why. It's not so much about the toppings or the sauce - it's about the crust. Sometimes you just want a thick, toothsome, bready crust and New York Neapolitan just doesn't scratch that itch. To that end, it's really too bad that Howie's is way too far away for us to get on a regular basis. I would much rather order a pizza from here whenever we get that hankering rather than ordering from Round Table.

In the you-take-the-good-with-the-bad department, one other way Howie's pizza resembles chain store pie is the cheese content. As in, there's a lot of it. I love cheese as much or maybe more than the next person, but sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. One of the first things we noticed on the menu was the lack of a margherita pizza, which is what we normally order the first time we go to a new pizza place. Margherita - tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil - is usually a good baseline indicator of how good the pizza is because the simplicity of the ingredients let you really taste each one and judge how good they are. With the lack of a margherita or even the option of fresh mozzarella as a topping, we went with our favorite veggie ones - red onion and sweet peppers. The cheese was such a dominating factor that I couldn't even tell you if the sauce was any good because all I was tasting was cheese. And I wasn't too crazy about the inclusion of green bell peppers. I somehow assumed that 'sweet peppers' meant the same thing as 'roasted red peppers,' which it obviously didn't. Green bell peppers on pizza remind me of Pizza Hut Supreme. This was better than that, but somehow I don't equate green bell peppers with being sweet or artisan. As much as I love my vegetarian boyfriend, on occasion his dietary restrictions work against me. (Sorry, honey - kisses anyway!) The most artisan of Howie's toppings are of the meat variety and include house-made pancetta and fennel sausage. And you know how I love my salty pork products. If I made it to Howie's again with a meat-eating dining companion, I'd love to give the pancetta, arugula and egg pizza a whirl. It sounds right up my alley.



One of the things I really liked about Howie's is that Howard definitely did his homework. He borrows little elements from other restaurants that I love, like serving Ritual coffee (a San Francisco gold standard) and Straus Family Creamery soft serve sundaes (popularized by Bruce Hill's Pizzeria Picco, one of my all-time favorite restaurants). Pizzeria Picco was the first place I knew of that was doing soft serve with olive oil and sea salt, and Howie's follows the trend. Having already had our olive oil fix for the night, we opted for the butterscotch pecan praline sundae. Only, our server brought us a peppermint brownie sundae, which last time I checked, doesn't sound anything like butterscotch pecan praline. We found this hilarious because on the way down there we read a review on Yelp where a woman wrote that she ordered a plain ice cream and they brought her peppermint - and that the waiter clearly thought that plain meant peppermint. She was like, 'what kind of place assumes you want peppermint ice cream as a default?' Maybe they ordered way too much peppermint ice cream and are coming up with sneaky ways to try to get rid of it. Anyway, it was weird that the peppermint ice cream thing came up more than once. When we did finally get our dessert, it was great. It's big enough to share but not so huge that it's overwhelming, and there's lots of butterscotch and pralines to go around. It's pretty hard to screw up Straus Family Creamery soft serve and butterscotch. Unless you are trying to replace the vanilla with peppermint on the sly.

Although it may sound like I groused a bit about the pizza, it was still way better than your average family-style pizzeria. It's just that there are so many phenomenal pizza places in San Francisco and Oakland that I'm a bit spoiled and jaded. It's not quite in the same league as Pizzeria Picco or Pauline's, in my humble opinion, but Howie definitely deserves props for bringing quality pizza to the lower Peninsula.

On the "About Us" page of his website, Howie talks about his reasoning for leaving fine dining for pizza making. "There are some serious and pressing issues regarding the way we feed our families in this country. These are issues which affect our health, the integrity of our families and the well-being of our planet. These are issues which I am passionate about, committed to, and have been somewhat powerless to affect, until now. And while it might seem strange, perhaps absurd, to talk about changing the world and building a better, healthier community in the context of a simple pizza pie, that’s exactly what I plan to do."

With a manifesto like that, how can I not want this place to succeed?

The deets: Howie's Artisan Pizza, Town and Country Village, 850 El Camino Real, Palo Alto. Open 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. Phone: 650-32-PIZZA (650-327-4992). On the web at www.howiesartisanpizza.com.