Leslie Peng, The Slanted Door, featuring Hodo Soy
Saturday, March 10, 2018, 12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
Stop by the CUESA Classroom for a cooking demo featuring the seasonal bounty of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. This demo will highlight a producer-chef relationship forged and sustained at the farmers market, featuring Hodo Soy.
Leslie Peng is a Northern California native who grew up in Davis against the beautiful backdrop of farmlands. She moved to the Bay Area to attend university and fell in love with the wide diversity of new cuisines she tasted in Berkeley. She began working as a prep cook, determined to become a part of the fascinating world of restaurants, and gradually progressed through the ranks in the kitchen. Eventually she found she could dovetail her passion for sweets and background in science in the field of pastry. She attended Western Culinary Academy in Portland, Oregon to study pastry, and after her graduation she returned to the Bay Area to work at The Ritz-Carlton San Francisco, where she deepened her love and technique for French pastry. Under the tutelage of Christopher Lee and Samin Nosrat in Berkeley, she adopted the mantras that still shape her cooking today—the elevation of beautiful locally sourced, sustainable produce, and honoring the ancient tradition of cooking with love, care, and respect.
After a few years cooking in Sacramento, she returned to San Francisco in 2014, joining the Slanted Door family as their Executive Pastry Chef. In 2017, after showcasing her creative talents by running the pastry department, she was promoted to Chef de Cuisine.
As a child in Vietnam, Minh Tsai took morning strolls with his grandpa to the neighborhood tofu shack. The freshness and artisan-quality of the soymilk, tofu and yuba of his childhood eluded Minh for many years and ultimately led Minh to leave a finance career to found Hodo Soy in 2004. Hodo now supplies tofu to Chipotle nationwide, sweetgreen, and notable Bay Area restaurants including Slanted Door, State Bird Provisions, The Progress, SHED Cafe at Healdsburg Shed, and Mister Jiu’s.
All demos take place in the CUESA Classroom (under the white tents in front of the Ferry Building) and are free to the public, with recipes and samples for all.