Octavio Peña

Freelance writer with KQED, Eater, Serious Eats, Food & Wine, and more

KQED •

A Tiny Takeout Window Sells Some of the Tastiest Pies in San Jose

A small red building in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood is a laboratory for unbridled culinary experimentation. At Sweetdragon Baking Company, nut brittles are filled with potato chips, pies are loaded with Japanese curry, and sweet-and-savory bacon cookies are spiked with Jack Daniels.
A mural in front of the building provides a sneak peek into the bakery’s whimsical approach to recipe development: A dragon in a white chef’s toque whisks a bowl of batter while several animal friends bustle...
Serious Eats •

How to Make Crispy Chicken Chimichangas That Don't Fall Apart

Nearly everything tastes better deep-fried—avocados, Oreos, Twinkies—but I believe few are as brilliant as the deep-fried burrito, aka the chimichanga. These stuffed and fried flour tortillas are so popular in the Southwest that several restaurants in Arizona try to take credit for the dish's invention. My love for chimichangas goes all the way back to my childhood. My first encounter with chimichangas was through reading Deadpool comics as a kid: the titular Marvel character loves chimichangas...
SFGATE •

Popular Bay Area bakery with epic sandwiches opens to lines out the door

On a recent Saturday morning, a new bakery in downtown San Jose was alive with the sounds of Japanese city pop and sizzling sausage patties. Milk Belly, an Asian-inspired bakery from Maria Belzunce and Jason Venters that debuted in January with lines out the door, specializes in unique sourdough, like mochi porridge and ube-coconut, as well as more traditional offerings, like Japanese milk bread, or shokupan, which is used to make peanut butter-coated Hong Kong-style French toast.

On a recent S...
Eater SF •

Eat Wonderfully Crispy, Netted Egg Rolls at This East San Jose Restaurant

Egg rolls are a staple appetizer at Vietnamese restaurants across the Bay, but at SJ Eggrolls, they’re the star of the show. The small shop in East San Jose specializes in chả giò rế, or netted egg rolls, which bumps up the crispiness of a traditional egg roll by encasing the filling in a brittle web wrapper. While netted egg rolls are available elsewhere in San Jose, they’re typically made with premade wrappers that lack the distinct crunch of freshly made wrappers. At SJ Eggrolls, however, the...
KQED •

This San Jose Seafood Truck Serves One of the Spiciest Dishes in the Bay Area

Mariscos El Aguachiles 8 is a seafood trailer wrapped in a giant, chile-red octopus tucked away in a small, bustling Mexican neighborhood a few minutes from Downtown San Jose. Its main attraction? Aguachile served in 12 heat levels — ranging from tickle-in-the-back-of-your-throat to capsaicin-induced hysteria — that might be the single spiciest dish in the entire Bay Area.
Even if you’re not a heat seeker, the business has become a community hub for all seafood lovers. During my visit on a cold...
Serious Eats •

My Family’s Nourishing Mexican Meatball Soup is Perfect for a Cold Day

In my favorite children’s book, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the fabled town of Chewandswallow deals with tomato tornados and hailing meatballs. After reading the book, I remember wishing an unfathomable amount of sopa de albondigas, Mexican meatball soup, would pour down from the sky. In Mexican albondigas, meatballs speckled with rice, alliums, and herbs are served in a light, tomato-based broth along with a variety of fresh vegetables. It’s a dish I grew up eating, and one I still enjoy...
Serious Eats •

Score Major Points on Game Day With These Fiery Chicken Wings

I’m a chicken wing enthusiast. I’ll get them every time I see them on a menu. I’m talking gochujang wings at Korean barbecue; fish sauce–coated wings while eating pho; and buffalo wings at pizza joints. But in all my years of gnawing on drumettes, I’ve never come across a Mexican take on wings. So I decided to apply my years of studying chicken wings at the dining table and my love of Mexican cuisine to create this spicy, aromatic, crunchy Mexican-inspired chicken wing recipe.

These wings are...
KQED •

An Indonesian Coffee Pop-up Brings Pandan Lattes to San Jose | KQED

Indonesian coffee shops are sprouting up in the Bay Area, introducing local caffeine hounds to aromatic, uniquely tropical drinks. The newest addition to the scene is Hijau, a coffee pop-up in San Jose known for crafting lattes with flavors like pineapple, coconut, lemongrass and ginger.
South Bay residents Lisa Maria and Ryan Prawiradjaja started Hijau in February of 2024. Maria was born and raised in Bekasi, the largest city in West Java, Indonesia, and immigrated to the United States15 years...
Serious Eats •

Can You Tell Your Chipotles From Your Adobos? A Guide to Mexican Chiles

The wall of dried chiles at the Mexican grocery store is always mesmering to me—a mural with colors ranging from bright red to black that exudes the aroma of fruit, chocolate, raisins, and nuts—but it can also be daunting. With at least a dozen varieties on the shelf, it can be difficult to know which type of chile is best for which dishes. Even for those familiar with dried chiles, like me, things get a bit complicated when the same name is used to identify different chiles (pasillas, for examp...
KQED •

A South Bay Pop-Up Is Reinventing the Doughnut

The contents of a pink doughnut box are usually pretty predictable — chocolate- or sprinkle-covered rings that offer a bit of sweetness and chewiness to get you through your morning. But at Eizel’s Bakery, a pop-up in the South Bay, some of the doughnuts are glazed with crackly caramelized sugar while others are filled with saucy crustaceans. Another Korean-inspired, doughnut-adjacent treat erupts with garlicky custard when you bite in.
Of course, Eizel’s isn’t the first bakery to try to reinven...
Eater SF •

Head to This Late-Night San Jose Taco Cart for Steamy Cabeza

At their finest, tacos de cabeza (cow head) are soft, intensely beefy shredded meat encased in a pillowy steamed tortilla. One of the best places to get head in San Jose is in a gas station parking lot. Tacos Al Vapor Blanquita, a little food cart off of San Jose’s Story & King, is more than meets the eye. You don’t need to rack your brain to decide what to order here — the only item on the menu is tacos al vapor de cabeza. While cabeza is a common offering at taquerias, most places offer a mixt...
Serious Eats •

This Tiny Thermometer Can Track Two Temperatures at Once, Making It Great for Multitaskers

When I first moved into my apartment, my oven was churning out pale chicken skin, limp broccolini, and underbaked cookies. It wasn’t until I invested in a probe thermometer that I realized my oven’s display was off and that preheating took twice as long as it claimed. I also often cook for family and friends in their homes, so whenever I pack my cooking bag for a dinner party, I tuck my ThermoWorks Square DOT into my apron’s pocket. This tiny thermometer has made an outsized impact on my life....
Serious Eats •

My Family's Comforting Pozole Rojo Relies on This 1 Game-Changing Ingredient

Pozole in its many iterations has been a beloved part of celebrations and family gatherings in Mexico for centuries. I grew up eating pozole rojo, a hearty pork version of the soup infused with a blend of fruity chiles and warm spices. The soup—which is studded with tender morsels of pork and hominy and finished with a rainbow of toppings like tostadas, lime wedges, thin slices of cabbage, onion, avocado, and more—was a mainstay at family birthdays and other celebrations. My aunts would (and sti...
Eater SF •

This Impressive San Jose Vietnamese Restaurant Is a One-Man Show

In a sleepy corner of San Jose’s Eastside foothills, AK Kitchen dishes out Vietnamese street food, South Asian ice cream flavors made in-house, and furikake Chex Mix. The menu also features popular dishes from Japanese, Korean, and Indian cuisine. The most impressive part? The restaurant is run by a team of one.
Lam Ngo moved from Vietnam to San Jose with hopes of attending culinary school but was discouraged due to the cost. Instead, he attended De Anza College where he studied accounting and e...
Eater SF •

Moonwake Coffee

Moonwake Coffee Roasters brings a serene coffee experience to West San Jose. Owners Ming Wood and Mabel Yeung started by selling coffee and roasted coffee beans at pop-ups and farmers markets (notably serving drinks out of the trunk of a Tesla Cybertruck). Now, as of Friday, September 27th, the couple opened a cafe highlighting coffee, grassy, silky matcha lattes, and zippy elderflower tonics with sweet, tropical flavors. Wood and Yeung built much of the space themselves, even planting coffee tr...
KQED •

San Jose Gets a Guatemalan Food Truck | KQED

Food trucks tend to focus on meals that can be enjoyed on the go, so when I came across Shaddai, a new Guatemalan food truck in San Jose, I was shocked to see cooks walking steaming-hot bowls of pepián de gallina and caldo de res over to eager diners. More than that, the menu is huge — literally a banner as tall as the truck — and features hard-to-find specialties like chow mein tostadas and Guatemalan enchiladas.
Located in a bustling food truck park on the outskirts of downtown, Shaddai is the...
Eater SF •

Intergalactic and Planetary Paletas Splash Down in San Jose

Birthday cake. Ube brownie. Pistachio cheesecake. These sound more like treats you would stroll upon in a bakery rather than flavors in a popsicle shop. Paleta Planeta built its reputation in San Jose as a Mexican popsicle business with stellar flavors. Brothers Mauricio and Luis Salazar started selling paletas from their parents’ garage in 2021. As their business expanded, they moved production to a ghost kitchen inside of Zuñiga’s Restaurant and invested in a paleta cart to cater events. Thei...
Serious Eats •

This Mexican Pork Ribs Recipe Has Been a Family Favorite for Generations

As a kid, I hated saucy food. Chills went up my spine whenever my foods touched one another on the plate; so, I actually dreaded when my family made morisqueta, the dish of white rice smothered with saucy pork ribs, beans, crema, and queso. I missed out on years of enjoying this hard-to-find specialty from the state of Michoacán in Mexico.

My dad, who was born in Michoacán, loves morisqueta so much that he playfully calls my mom Norisqueta—her name is Nora. About three years ago, after years o...
Kitchn •

My Impossibly Light and Fluffy Cake I Make Everyone for Their Birthday (It's Classic!)

Tres leches is a sponge cake that’s soaked in a combination of three milks — typically whole milk, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. Growing up, tres leches was my cousin Damean’s birthday cake of choice; I unfortunately couldn’t handle it due to my lactose intolerance. After many years of resisting temptation, I finally got myself lactase pills. Now I look forward to taking home as many leftover slices as I can.

Tres leches is a sponge cake that’s soaked in a combination of three milks — ty...
KQED •

This San Jose Restaurant Has Been Feeding Portuguese Immigrants for Nearly 80 Years

In the heart of San Jose’s Little Portugal, a grocery store the size of a 7-Eleven features a wall of Ports and Vinho Verdes, stacks of garlicky linguiça and cases of imported cheese. But Bacalhau Grill isn’t just a specialty food market. If you peek over the shelves, you’ll see a full-fledged restaurant dining room with tables covered with checkered tablecloths. On a recent Friday afternoon, one diner was making quick work of a plate of picanha and fries while a couple split a pizza over a bott...
Food & Wine •

If You Love Piña Coladas, You'll Want to Want to Make This Easier Riff

It’s a hot summer day, and you’ve been assigned to grill duty. You need a refreshing drink to power through searing several pounds of carne asada and hot dogs. Do you opt for limeade, horchata, or a piña colada?  What if you could choose a drink that combines elements from all three? 

Coconut lime horchata gives a horchata base the piña colada treatment by blending it with ice and cream of coconut. The flavor of the rice and coconut harmonize to produce a mellow, slightly nutty drink. A spritz...
Food & Wine •

How to Take Your Morning Iced Coffee From Good to Great

In many Mexican households, a cafecito and a pan dulce serve as a pre-breakfast or post-dinner snack. Traditionally made in a clay pot, Café de Olla is made with a blend of warm spices that often includes cinnamon, clove, and star anise. It’s often served black with the piloncillo (unrefined whole cane sugar) as a sweetener.

This recipe draws inspiration from the Mexican mocha, a coffee made by combining cocoa powder and chiles. The recipe calls for chiles de arbol because they pack a punch de...
Eater SF •

Bouncy, Hand-Pulled Noodles Star at This New Uyghur Restaurant in Santa Clara

Located in a small plaza in Santa Clara, Tarim Garden specializes in the cuisine of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Northwest China, a rarity in the Bay Area. More specifically, the menu is reflective of the dinner tables of Ili — a region in the Tian Shan mountain range valley that separates the North (Dzungarian Basin, also known as Junggar Basin) and South (Tarim Basin) of Xinjiang. Five years ago, owner Lei Han moved to the U.S. from Ili to study for a master’s degree in business ad...
Serious Eats •

Salsa Macha

The marriage of chiles and nuts is well celebrated in Mexican cuisine— in moles, chocolate bars, and drinks, to name a few applications. The smoky, nutty, savory pairing keeps people coming back for more. My favorite way to enjoy this combination of flavors is in salsa macha. I drizzle this fruity, spicy chile oil over almost everything, including eggs, grilled meats, and almost all my tacos. 

Salsa macha originated in Orizaba, Veracruz, but has since spread to dining tables across Mexico. In...
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