You Gotta Try This: For homey, cheesy goodness, head to Putah Creek Cafe for corn pie
This is “You Gotta Try This,” The Bee’s series featuring one particular must-have dish at a local restaurant. Each featured dish is nominated by a reader and chronicled at sacbee.com. Got a menu item you want to shine some light on? Email reporter Benjy Egel at begel@sacbee.com.
A glass display case full of scratch-made desserts sits below Putah Creek Cafe’s register. Lemon bars and magic bars lie next to the cheesecakes, triple-nut pies and Dutch apple pies available in slices or whole.
The Winters restaurant’s best pie, though, might be the savory one served exclusively during lunch or weekend brunch. Putah Creek Cafe’s corn pie, similar to a tamale pie, fuses moist cornbread together with gooey cheese and a dash of heat to form a distinctly unique dish.
Most of the corn pie comes together through mixing ready-made ingredients. The first mix includes eggs, creamed corn, fresh corn, pasilla chiles and Worcestershire sauce, followed by shredded Monterey Jack and cheddar cheese. Cooks Velia Lorretta or Ralph Martinez then mix sour cream, salt and more Worcestershire sauce in a separate bowl, fold them in, and add cornmeal and mixes for the last time.
Once the batter is properly prepared, Lorretta or Martinez pours the mixture into a springform pan and bakes it at 225 degrees for an hour before pulling it out. They then sprinkle chili flakes on top, cover the pan and bake it for another hour at the same heat.
“It’s super, super simple. It’s not a temperamental type of dish like a dessert might be,” chef Fred Reyes said. “It’s really moist (and) obviously has a cheesy flavor to. A little bit of heat from the chiles, and it’s pretty delicate in a lot of ways.”
A cook cuts a 3-inch by 5-inch by 3-inch slice of the finished pie and plates it with chips and tomato salsa on the side and a dollop of sour cream on top. The chips are house-fried corn tortilla triangles; the salsa’s tomatoes, serrano peppers and onions are roasted in Putah Creek Cafe’s outdoor pizza oven, blended with salt and finished with chopped cilantro.
The tomatoes come from Winters-based Peach Farm, which ironically only recently began growing peaches after years of specializing in vegetables. Putah Creek Cafe also grows some of its own produce such as the chiles and cilantro used in the pie in a garden across Main Street.
The $13 corn pie comes with Putah Creek Cafe’s soup of the day or a salad, a spring mix of romaine, red leaf and green leaf lettuce and arugula. It’s garnished with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and sprouts from Peach Farm and served with a choice of housemade dressing (blue cheese, ranch, vinaigrette or Thousand Island).
Invented by former Buckhorn Steakhouse manager Loretta Kovacic (now Loretta Schell) in 1998, the corn pie is Putah Creek Cafe’s third-most popular item, Reyes said. One of the few non-salad vegetarian options on the restaurant’s menu, it gets ordered about 80 times per week.
After spending most of his early career cooking at California golf courses, resorts and restaurants, Reyes helped open Centro Cocino Mexicana in Sacramento in 1999 and stayed for eight years. He started at Putah Creek Cafe in 2008, when restaurants were beginning to feel the weight of the recession and development around Putah Creek Cafe was a dicey proposition.
But co-owner John Pickerel, who also owns Buckhorn Steakhouse with his wife Melanie Bajakian Pickerel, pushed with city manager John Donlavey to build to make Main Street more walkable and more of a downtown destination. Over the next five years, Winters developed into the quaint destination town it is today. USA Today named it the No. 4 small-town food scene in America in 2018, and the 73-room Hotel Winters — the town’s first major lodging option — just opened down the block from the cafe.
“I enjoy Winters. It’s a really great small community, and there’s a lot going on, lot of local events. The community supports the town,” Reyes said. “It’s a nice, easy place to visit and live and work.”
PUTAH CREEK CAFE
1 Main St., Winters, (530) 795-2682
Info: www.putahcreekcafe.com/
Hours: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday and Sunday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Pro Tip: After Mexican-American cooks started serving other kitchen staff their home recipes for “family meals,” Reyes added them to the menu in September as a rotating special. Cooks’ family recipes for pozole, pork tamales, chili verde and sopes have been served.
Correction: This story has been updated to properly reflect Loretta Kovacic’s maiden and married names.
This story was originally published November 18, 2019 at 4:00 AM.