By Blake Royer
A couple days ago Elin and I went to our community garden plots to
asses things after a two and a half week absence from New York. When we
left, our garden was thriving with tomatoes, kale, collard greens,
beets, carrots, corn, and peppers. Despite our best efforts to screw
things up, the Brooklyn soil continues to sprout edibles.
We returned to find out tomato plants brown, drooping, and shriveled.
Yet as they had started to die, they seemed to panicly produce as much
fruit as possible--presumably to pass on their seed. Though the
branches were frail and crumbling, the plants were studded with 50 or
60 cherry tomatoes, and from the others we pulled 6 large heirloom
tomatoes, fragrant and soft. We put them all in a shoebox on the
kitchen counter, where they would be roasted for a tomato sauce, chopped into salsas, and marinated with basil and garlic to make a raw tomato pasta.
Our kale and collards were carrying on nicely without us, our peppers
had produced a few chilis for salsa and guacamole, and our corn plants
were sprouting three or four ears between them.
It's hard to figure out when you're suppose to pull beets and carrots
out of the ground, especially for a first time gardener. The greens
get larger and bushier, but it's hard to tell how big and developed the
root underneath it is.
We pulled them up anyway, because we didn't have a choice.
In just a
few hours, Elin and I are packing up the last of our things and heading
to the airport. We're leaving the Brooklyn apartment we've grown to love and
moving to Tartu, Estonia for the next ten months.
Longtime readers of this blog might remember my trip to Estonia two
summers ago, and the food that we ate. Elin is ethnically Estonian,
and though she was born and raised in California, she has developed a
keen personal and academic interest in Estonia's history. Late last
year she applied for a research grant and was awarded it earlier this
year. So off we go!
As for myself, I'll be a student, taking an
intensive Estonian language course and spending time volunteering at a
local elementary school. In my free time--I'll definitely have lots
more of it--I'll be exploring food in Estonia and as many other
European countries as we can afford to visit. So posts to this blog
will continue without a doubt; food is everywhere!
So it was with a bit of melancholy that we pulled up our beets and
carrots, which we quickly discovered weren't quite ready. But we carried our little baby vegetables home
and put together a bookend "Brooklyn Salad" to match the first one I
made at the beginning of the season.
Continue reading this post...
This whole site was started when we were fresh from college
and cooking together recklessly. Since our lives have changed--moving in with girlfriends, marriage, and new cities (and boroughs)--we don't always get to indulge in those old times. But with Blake in Chicago visiting this past week, it was like we were back at York Avenue in that tiny little apartment. From absurdly fatty hamburgers to restaurants in Chicago (post on those to come), we were indulging, and that's the polite way to say it. Pounds were gained, let's put it that way.
The one common theme that used to run through whatever we were cooking in the early days--no matter how elaborate or complex--was that was that dinner would take a long time to prepare, primarily because we were clueless and always had three or four comparable recipes open at the same time. So it was rather pleasant to look at the clock this past week while cooking enchiladas, see it was 11
p.m., and realize we still had awhile to go before our stomachs would be full.
Nick's wife Abby, being a darling, had realized we weren't going to feed her. She had eaten some four hours earlier and was just about ready to go to sleep.
But we were wide awake and ready. Our sauce was bubbling and reducing. We were going to have
enchiladas, and those are worth staying up for.
Continue reading this post...
By Nick Kindelsperger
I'm not sure what else to call this thing. I know that burgers are supposed to have a
decent amount of fat for flavor and such, but we just went too far. A few days out, and I'm still trying to recuperate.
The
plan started out as something far nobler. Together for the first time
since my wedding, and cooking for the first time together in what must
be a year, Blake and I decided to create the perfect burger. Using Blake's
expertise in beef combintations, my new Kitchen aid, and a technique I
had just recently uncovered, where the meat would be flipped every
20-30 seconds, we thought we had the whole burger world sussed.
The technique was first
proposed by Harold McGee and made famous recently by Heston Blumenthal
and his "Blumenburger". Instead of flipping the burger a minimum of
times like every other recipe I've ever read, this technique won't leave the patty alone. The idea is that the burger will develop a better crust
and the inside will still remain medium-rare. Sounded just crazy
enough to work.
And that it did. The outside had an unbelievable sear, and the inside was moist and luscious. It wasn't until later, when I could feel the oil swimming through my belly, that I realized that something truly sinister had happened and that I'd have to do a lot of sit-ups to make up for this one.
Continue reading this post...
By Blake Royer
My last post about the Fulton Street
Fish market covered its history, including corruption and mob
connections, leading up to the 2005 move from lower Manhattan up to
Hunts Point in the Bronx. This post is about our actual experience in
the market: how it functioned, what Hunts Point is like today, and a
few good eats in the area. While in Hunts Point we met a few fish
buyers, ate in
24-hour coffee shops, and were invited personally to "the
greatest strip club in Hunts Point," the subtly-named Triangle.
Hunts
Point itself is an unusual corner of New York City, a neighborhood
traditionally known for high crime and low income. It is separated
from the rest of the Bronx by the Bruckner Expressway near a
complicated interchange of the Triborough Bridge and the Hutchinson
River Parkway, which leads upstate. Red Hook, Brooklyn, a more
well-known neighborhood where recently, New York City's first IKEA was
built, has many parallels to Hunts Point: both are coastal
New York peninsulas without subway access, cut off from the rest of
their borough by highways. Robert Moses, the man who transformed New
York with his palatial vision of a future of the Automobile, built
both, along with skeins of highways that crisscross and slice up all
five boroughs of New York.
In
the early 1960s, the cross-Bronx expressway was completed, which plowed
through the South Bronx displacing and sometimes destroying
neighborhoods, and has since been blamed for much of the Bronx's
economic deterioration and decay. The portion of the expressway
isolating Hunts Point from the Bronx wasn't completed until the 70s.
By 1977, "the Bronx was burning" and President
Carter, visiting the trash-littered, bombed-out section of the borough,
declared it the worst slum in America.
Today,
gentrification and a safe New York has filtered into Hunts Point and
the rest of the South Bronx. Hunts Point has remained a very poor and
industrial neighborhood, with pockets of residential areas amongst the
industry, and the the trifecta of wholesale meat, produce, and seafood
markets make it the largest food distribution center in the world.
When we arrived at 4:00am, the sun was still a dim bulb on the horizon.
Continue reading this post...
By Nick Kindelsperger
For the past year I
have been banned from buying new kitchen appliances. Once
Abby and I got engaged, she decreed that I could not willfully purchase
anything new for the kitchen because we would be getting wedding presents. She was immovable. So as Blake ground his own meat for
hamburgers with a Kitchen Aid and made his own no-knead bread in a
Dutch oven, I sat and read wondering when my day would come.
Well, the day after the wedding I sat with Abby and for the next hour or so we opened gift after gift that were all exclusively for us. And for someone who loves to cook, getting married is like
having 25 Christmases piled into one glorious day. Sure, there are
a couple other things sprinkled in for the apartment that are lovely and
wanted. But the vast majority are centered around the kitchen, and,
obviously, I'm in the kitchen a lot.
Yeah, those are rocks, martini, champagne, red, and white
wine glasses
sitting on my brand new table. See those herbs hanging out in the
background? I've got a new Kitchen Aid, Cuisine Art Food Processor, Dutch oven, burr grinder, mandoline, ricer, blender, immersion blender, toaster, and so, so many more.
My All-Clad pan produced the most unbelievable pan sauce when I made Flattened Chicken Breasts with Shallot and White Wine Sauce. I've made Seasonal Ratatouille in my new 12 quart, stainless steel pot. And am finally attempting to my own no knead bread in my new dutch oven. I've been so humbled by
the gifts I've received. I can hardly believe my luck.
But then I thought, "What would wedding gifts be like for those people who don't like to cook?"
You remember the feeling when you're 8 and you get socks
for Christmas? Is that what it feels like for a couple that doesn't
particularly like to cook or need much more for dinner beyond a pan or two? During the registration process, Abby and I went to events for the newly engaged where the male just sat around and moped the entire time, while I was as giddy as could be.
I understand how people might be upset about getting a whole bunch of gifts they might not even no how to use. But the more I've thought about this the more I realized how integral the idea of cooking at home is tied to the concept of a family. It's kind of a sappy thought, but one I'm happy to indulge.
By Blake Royer
If you walk around Manhattan, it often seems like more than half of the
stores are restaurants, most of them busy and stuffed with people. It
doesn't take much thinking before one wonders how all that food gets
into the kitchens to feed them all. And not just the dining-out set: what about grocery stores? And bodegas. And butchers. And fish mongers. The sheer
quantity of food moved around the city every day is
breathtaking. How does it all happen?
Much of it originates in Hunts Point, a scrappy peninsula in the South Bronx
that bulges out from the borough like a hernia. It's quasi-industrial,
with a few housing projects, apartment buildings, and parks. There is an expansive collection of strip
clubs, too many auto shops to count--and the largest food
distribution center in the world.
Along with my friend Matt, I recently woke up at 3:30 on a Friday
morning--willingly--to visit Hunts Point, specifically the Fulton Street Fish Market. When we
arrived, the trash-littered streets were cast with harsh fluorescent
shadows, and Food Center Drive rumbled with the vibration of semis
hauling food in and out. Overhead, passenger jets landing and leaving
LaGuardia Airport screamed
and reverberated off the runways just across the Bronx River.
Together with the Fulton Street Fish market there are two other distribution
centers in Hunts Point, dealing in produce and meat. But visiting the fish market is the most stimulating and exciting.
Restaurants receive their produce and meat from many sources--you can often spot chefs at the Union Square greenmarket picking up vegetables, and it's not impossible for a restaurant to set up a direct relationship with, say, a pig farmer in upstate New York to source high-quality pork.
But seafood is different--without a distribution center, where the freshest seafood from all over the world can be gathered in a central location, a restaurant would have a heck of a time of it dealing with fishermen directly all over the globe. For this reason, even the fanciest restaurants come to Hunts Point for their fish.
The market is housed in a
massive, refrigerated warehouse, where inside there are dozens of
sellers who display their wares on ice and in boxes; every morning
buyers for restaurants, fish mongers, and grocery stores arrive to
select seafood, bargain for its price, then drive it to their respective establishments. Well over a hundred
million pounds of seafood travels through the market every year, and
the fish market alone is the largest in the United States.
Continue reading this post...
By Nick Kindelsperger
The smoke billowed out the side of the grill, casting a haze over the small deck of my sister's house. It smelled of sweet wood, pork fat, and vinegary sauce. I listened patiently to Hank Williams, drank cheap beer, and thought about starting my life over. Why am I wasting my life doing anything other than this? I could sit around and smoke meat for the rest of my life. Honestly, I'd never felt happiness like this before. I hinted at this with the bacon post, but there is real pleasure in smoking meat. And that pleasure is multiplied the longer the operation goes on. It only gets better.
Now this feeling of ultimate satisfaction occurred before I ever even tasted the meat. This just proves the what a crazy business barbecue actually is. I think other people have caught this bug. From the number of barbecue places popping up in the Midwest, I'd say that nearly everyone who has eaten good barbecue has dreamed about the slow life of cooking it for a living.
But cooking great barbecue is not simple and it is not easy. That's what I've learned while flipping through Mike Mill's Peace, Love, and Barbecue. I've tried a few simple recipes from the book, but without proper smoking equipment I couldn't really delve in. But with the grill already smoking with some of my American bacon, I decided to go all out and make real pulled pork.
My last attempt at making pulled pork sandwiches was high in enthusiasm but abysmally low in finesse. All I had was a little hibachi grill that I fueled with some self-starting charcoal. The charcoal would spend its fuel after about an hour, so I'd have to remove the meat, dump the used charcoal, light some more, wait 20 minutes until it had ashed over, and then set the meat back on and start again. I had no idea what the temperature was, or what the meat should look like. Despite all these inadequacies, the meat tasted real good, and was a hit for a backyard grill out.
But I didn't want something that tasted good, I wanted ethereal barbecue, the likes of which I have only tasted on very rare occasions. Instead of the North Carolina style of my last version, this is from Apple City Barbecue in Southern Illinois. It has a balanced sauce, that is slightly sweet, tangy, and loaded with...well, apple.
This version was not executed perfectly. I'm not sure that can be
done on a gas grill, but it is such a vast improvement over my last
attempt that I felt like documenting every second.
This recipe is obviously not quick, and it can seem overwhelming. It has 22 individual ingredients, takes two days of down time, and 5 hours of constant watching on the grill. There is a rub, a mop sauce, AND a barbecue sauce. If you're like me, you'll want cole-slaw on it, too.
But, like I've mentioned before, there isn't really anything as comforting as watching smoke pour out the side of a grill, especially when that period of time lasts over 5 hours and I have my two favorite dogs in the world to keep me company. Oh, and in the end of this process you'll have some of the greatest pulled pork sandwiches you've ever sunk your teeth into. Sound like a good day to you?
Continue reading this post...
It's been a bit quiet around here--so here's what we've been up to the last couple weeks.
First, the big, important news: Nick got hitched! On Saturday, July 26th, he married his lovely fiancée Abby in Columbus, Indiana; I was the best man. At the reception we ate Nick's own gravlax, which was delicious and, I imagine, extremely laborious to slice for over 200 people. Nick is currently in Mexico and on severely supervised hiatus from any and all computer-related activities He'll be back with us soon enough.
My class at Whole Foods was so much fun. I'm already hearing that the quickest of the cure projects, gravlax, has turned out successfully for some people. That makes me happy! Classes at the Whole Foods Bowery Culinary Center are affordable and interesting; in cooperation with the soon-to-be-launched Edible Manhattan, they are currently doing a whole "DIY" series, with upcoming classes on ricotta-making with Salvatore Brooklyn and pickling with McLure's (they're plugged into the Unfancy Food Show circuit). They are very open to suggestions for class ideas. What interesting foodstuff or product would you like to learn to make yourself? Email them.
In other news, my first heirloom tomatoes from my patio tomato plants have finally ripened -- a big bowl of Sun Golds, which are brilliantly orange cherry tomatoes with overwhelming sweetness and acidity in equal measures, and two from the Black Krim plant, a purplish-red tomato that's large with a rich, sweet, red-winey flavor. The sun golds made their way into this simple pasta recipe; the black krims were sliced thickly and contributed to one of the best BLT sandwiches of my young life.
We'll be back on a regular posting schedule soon enough, so thanks for hanging with us.
-Blake
