Made from scratch

I’m weary of the frozen hash browns, canned corn-beef hash, reconstituted pancake mix, pasteurized juices, imitation maple syrup, lousy coffee and mass-produced baked goods. I am particularly disdainful of any place that spreads toast with that wartime product known as margarine.

I mean, it’s breakfast, for crying out loud. It’s simple. No need to go to culinary school. Just get a basic cookbook, assemble some quality ingredients and prepare a few things from scratch. Not a big deal.

Yet I have a hard time finding a place in the central city that is down with the program. And none of the good places I’ve found can claim to be a traditional breakfast joint. One is a British pub (Fox and Goose, reviewed here two weeks ago), one is a Mexican restaurant (Texas) and one is a yuppie café (Café Bernardo).

So where can you go to get a made-from-scratch, biscuits and gravy, chicken-fried steak, bacon, eggs and hotcakes kind of breakfast? The Putah Creek Café, in the Yolo County town of Winters. It’s worth the 25-mile drive.

I had seen the café a few times over the years. Although I had never dropped in, I often noted that there was a line of people waiting to get a table. Now I know why: The ingredients are quality, and the food is made from scratch.

The owners are John and Melanie Pickerel, of the vaunted Buckhorn Steak and Roadhouse that sits right across the street. The Pickerels know what they are doing when it comes to preparing good, honest home cooking.

The setting, literally, is small-town America, Main Street, circa 1900. You look out the café windows and see the old brick hotel building that the Buckhorn now occupies. The country-pine dining room reverberates with neighborly conversation.

My companions and I started with what I consider to be a kind of holy trinity of home cooking: chicken-fried steak, home fries and biscuit with gravy ($6.95).

The chicken-fried steak came with a crunchy breading, fried darker than the preferred golden brown, but still plenty gratifying. The breading surrounded a fair-sized portion of tenderized beef that was gently chewy and flavorful.

Home fries were built from fresh Russet potatoes, judiciously salted and perfectly cooked, with a bit of crispiness from the griddle. The biscuit was a thing of beauty, 3 inches square, with the pure flavors and freshness that indicated scratch cooking. Meaty chunks of pork sausage decorated the gravy, although the sauce was a bit salty for my taste.

The blueberry flapjacks ($3.45 for two), bulging with plump berries, had a fresh, chewy consistency, again suggesting that someone in the kitchen actually had measured out the basic ingredients.

A large fruit salad ($5.85) came in a glass bowl brimming with flame grapes, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, banana, pineapple, walnuts and raisins, with a nice tang from a poppy-seed dressing. The chopped walnuts tasted fresh enough to have come from the orchards surrounding the town.

The café also performed on the smaller details. The coffee was a well-balanced dark roast. The toast was spread with real butter, not margarine. Oh, and then there was the little detail that really warmed my heart—Putah Creek Café serves homemade pie.

Heck, good pie is even harder to find than a scratch-cooked breakfast. I have been known to drive to Grass Valley to get good pie. I wasn’t going to allow the early-morning hour to slow me down. So I ordered a slice of apple to go, along with an apricot bar and chocolate-walnut brownie for good measure.

Unfortunately, the pie crust had a uniformity and lack of flakiness that suggested that the crust was not truly homemade, although it was tender and there was an addictive, crumbly topping that tasted of cinnamon. The apricot bar seemed scratch-made, but it would have benefited from more apricot flavor. The moist brownie, enhanced by a dark chocolate frosting, went straight down the hatch.

The only notable miscue in the entire meal was the vegetarian omelet ($7.35), which included vibrant sun-dried tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms and melted jack cheese. There was nothing wrong with the omelet except for the presence of marinated artichokes that tasted too much of vinegar. Upon tasting it, I concluded that vinegar and eggs are a good match only when paired with an Easter egg dye.

Putah Creek Café is open daily for breakfast and lunch, with dinner served Friday through Sunday. We’ll be back, and would suggest that some of the other breakfast joints that don’t know scratch check it out.