Local Tomatoes and Sweet Corn

The Roadfood.com poll asked: Local Summer Vegetables: What Do You Crave?  The overwhelming response was tomatoes and sweet corn.  No doubt the sorry supermarket versions of these vegetables play a big role in that preference.  Both tomatoes and corn are especially suited to local eating: tomatoes have to be picked before they’re ripened to withstand the travel and rough supermarket handling, and while supermarket corn can be picked ripe, it has to be enjoyed within hours of picking for maximum flavor.  We’ve been hitting up our local farmers market week after week for corn and tomatoes and we haven’t tired of them in the least.  It’s a long, cold winter filled with pink tomatoes and frozen corn niblets.

It’s What’s Inside the Taco That Counts

It’s what’s inside the taco the counts.  At least, that’s what 71% of you said when the Roadfood.com poll asked, What's the Key Element in a Great Taco?  We’d bet that the same folks who chose the fresh tortillas also think that the pizza crust is more important than the toppings (and that includes us).  Tacos are found all over the country, but those made with fresh tortillas are rare outside of limited geographical regions, and those made with freshly-made (as opposed to packaged) tortillas are rarer still.  If you find a taqueria that makes their own tortillas, you’re usually in luck; if they go to that kind of trouble, the fillings and garnishes are likely to be top-notch, too.  Flour or corn… soft or crunchy… lengua or cabeza… those are questions for another day.

Thin Is In

The Roadfood.com poll: My Favorite Style of Pizza Crust is...  The overwhelming choice of Roadfood.com readers?  Thin.  Not surprising; it’s been the standard pizza crust since Lombardi’s, of New York City, introduced these tomato and cheese rounds to America in the beginning of the last century (or did they?  We have a feeling Jane and Michael Stern will address pizza’s origins in America, in their much-anticipated pizza magazine.)  Some people pointed out, in the Roadfood.com Forums, that some thin pizzas have a crisp, cracker-like crust and, yes, we agree this choice (which we are not generally fond of) deserves to be broken out from thin pizzas – they are very different.

Perhaps what is most surprising is the relatively strong showing of grandma pie.  In our experience, it’s the hardest to find of them all, practically unknown outside of NY and NJ, and, despite its harkening back to the homemade pizzas of Italian grandmothers of times gone by, is a fairly recent invention.  One possible explanation: we’ve found that, in pizzerias that turn out very mediocre or worse regular pizzas, if they offer a grandma pie (sometimes called a nonna pie) it’s usually the simplest and best-tasting pizza in the house, with a much more edible crust.

Deep-dish pies originated in Chicago and are now a popular option at the national chains;  we grew up with Sicilian pies in our New York suburban youth but almost never find them outside the Northeast, and today their popularity seems to have waned even in NY;  most people know French bread pizza from Stouffer’s in the freezer case of their local supermarket, but it was invented, if we understand this correctly, in Ithaca, NY in the 60s, by Hot Truck.

What other kinds of crust are there?  Michael Stern wrote about a pizza built upon a bed of spaghetti!  We remember making English muffin pizzas, in the toaster oven, as kids.  We can’t think of any others, but 44 people chose the Something Else option in the poll, so… what else is there?

It’s Easy Being Green in New Mexico

Chile in New Mexico is unlike chili anywhere else in the country, and it goes beyond that trailing vowel.  Most of us think of chili as a spicy beef stew, sometimes containing beans, and seasoned with ground chilis and other things.  In New Mexico, chile, the dish, is a celebration of chile, the state vegetable.  At its most elemental it is little more than the pureed fresh pod, perhaps seasoned with some garlic and salt.  This is green chile, and it is used more as a sauce than a stew.  And that is the stuff that came out on top in the Roadfood.com poll which asked, What's Your New Mexico Chile Preference?

Cook the dried pods into a sauce and you have New Mexico red chile, a very different but no less delicious concoction than the more celebrated green chile.  You will often be asked in a New Mexico restaurant what kind of chile you want on the dish you ordered.  Some will answer “Christmas,” and that means you want both!

Those who responded that they haven’t yet tried chile and would like to find out for themselves which they prefer will have the opportunity to do so on September 17 and 18, by snagging one of the few remaining tickets to this year’s Roadfood Eating Tour of New Mexico.  A word of warning: New Mexico chile is like a drug.  Once tried, you’ll find yourself craving the substance for the rest of your life.

Free Parking and Come As You Are

Free parking and come as you are: that would seem to be the ideal restaurant situation for Roadfood.com readers, according to the recent poll which asked Which is the Biggest Restaurant Dealbreaker?  All these potential issues even crop up with Roadfood restaurants.  Having to dress up is probably least likely of all the choices at a Roadfood-recommended place, but it does happen, especially if you consider “dress up” to mean you have to at least give some thought to the issue.  It’s a fact of urban life that you’ll often have to pay for parking to visit many downtown Roadfood joints.  A fair number are in dicey neighborhoods.  Many of the best places often require a rather long wait.  No credit cards is common with Roadfood but, luckily, that’s usually not an issue, as the tab is often very low.

We pictured Peter Luger in Brooklyn, above, because it hits on a few of the dealbreakers.  They don’t take credit cards (and the bill is high enough to require a special ATM visit); the neighborhood is actually fine now, but it wasn’t so long ago that it was not; we doubt they’d refuse entry to you if you showed up for Saturday night dinner in shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt, but you’d definitely feel out-of-place; it’s probably pretty unlikely that you’ll find free street parking nearby, and NYC residents are probably going to cab it; if you show up without a reservation you will wait for a table for sure; but they do serve liquor.

Lobster… Butter… Lobster… Butter…

We asked Roadfooders for their opinion on the following: Most Excessive and Utterly Delicious Use of Butter.  The solid winner was Soaked Into a Hot Lobster Roll.  Hot lobster rolls usually top any poll in which they appear; anyone who has ever eaten one knows why.

There was some talk on the Roadfood Forums about some of the other choices, in particular the perch and the brats.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  Yet both are standard offerings in particular regions of the country: butter dresses fried perch in Northwest Indiana, and almost always shows up with Sheboygan brats (Wisconsin likes to show off their dairy state bounty).  We recall one double-brat in particular, at a bar in Sheboygan.  At first bite we were annoyed by what we thought was a thick spread of unordered mayo.  Closer inspection revealed that it was not mayo, but soft butter – about half a stick’s worth!  It’s the sort of thing we’d never do at home (because it’s excessive) but we love on the road (because it’s utterly delicious).

Happy (Belated) National Peach Ice Cream Day!

One oversight in packing for our month-long roadtrip was failing to bring along the 2010 Roadfood calendar to keep us in the know with regard to upcoming food-related holidays. Fortunately, however, it seems that we have a second food sense, which alerted us to the fact that this past Saturday was National Peach Ice Cream Day. We celebrated this momentous occasion at Classic Frozen Custard in Des Moines, Iowa with a fabulously creamy cup of their peach custard. The rotating flavor menu at this small shack on SE 14^th St. is a consistent winner…and certainly deserves the review that we will be posting in the near future!

Bush Meadow Farm Enjoys Deserved Success

We’d recently been thinking about the mouthwatering Chuckwagon Beans at Bush Meadow Farm in Union, Connecticut, so we drove down yesterday for a marvelous lunch and chat with owners Barry & Nancy Kapplan. The family-run business has reached new levels of success: their dairy plant now produces the artisan Bush Meadow Blue Cheese. Their charcuterie (“a Food Network term for being in the meat business,” jokes Barry) has added a delicious spicy Canadian bacon and artisan Gravlox White Fish to their smoked meat offerings. “The smoked beef brisket is my favorite!” adds Nancy. CT Public TV host Jason Hawkins filmed Episode 4 of his “Where’s Jason?” series at the Farm. Christopher Brooks paid a visit last month and wrote a fine article for the New York Times. Finally, they have a beautiful new website that highlights all menu items plus monthly specials. Bush Meadow Farm is open Thursdays and Fridays, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Kapplans are keeping normal hours for the Independence Day weekend, too!

Harold’s Famous In-Between Triple Decker

We’d made plans to dine at the tres-chic Stage Left in New Brunswick (NJ) for our anniversary earlier in the week.  When the time came, we realized that what we really, truly wanted to do was dine on corned beef and pastrami at Harold's in Edison (hadn't been there in months).  So we canceled New Brunswick and pointed our car towards the Edison office parks.

We'd always wondered what sort of people would order the Harold's Famous In-Between Triple Decker - never seen one go out to a table.  Well, we’ve met the gluttons and they are us.  Choose corned beef, pastrami, or brisket, or a combination of two meats.  We selected corned beef and pastrami.  It's much like a regular triple-decker, except... they replace the rye bread with their foot-wide, inch-thick potato pancakes!

The pastrami was, as usual, the finest in the tri-state area (which means, in the country).  The corned beef, good as it ordinarily is, was better than it has ever been – absolutely perfect, moist, briny, fragrant, tender, with just the right amount of fat.  About those pancakes: we’ve always been lukewarm on Harold’s potato pancakes (and all other restaurant potato pancakes, for that matter), because they are finely grained, doughy, and a little sweet.  We make them at home to be more like hash browns: shredded, oniony, and crisp.  But we found that the soak in the cured meat “juices” elevated these manhole covers a level or two.  Of course, we had access to the pickle bar and the stacks of chewy crusted rye bread found there.

We chatted with Harold on the way out, and he noted that his cardiologist – in fact, the whole cardiology practice – dine at his place regularly.  Reminds us of the story about how Nathan of the original Coney Island Nathan’s would allow doctors from the nearby hospital to eat free if they dined in their hospital garb, which was meant to reassure potential customers about the wholesomeness of Nathan’s franks.

Here’s the box score: we both ate till we were stuffed, perhaps a pound-and-a-half of meat total.  One of us dined the next evening on leftovers – maybe another pound.  We then wrapped the rest and froze it for Harold’s ‘n’ Eggs breakfasts.  We weighed what was finally left – three pounds of meat!  Cost of the sandwich: $56.95.  We’re glad to have done it once, but would we order one again?  With first-time guests in tow, perhaps.

National Onion Rings Day

According to our Roadfood calendar, today is National Onion Rings Day. In our pre-frozen world of foodservice, vigilance pays off when searching for homemade onion rings (much like hand-cut French fries), and here are half a dozen of New England’s finest examples. Clockwise from left: Red’s Eats, Wiscasset, ME; Murphy’s Route 66 Drive-In, Columbia, CT; Johnny Ad’s, Old Saybrook, CT; regular onion rings and the curiously addictive onion middles from Harraseeket Lobster, Freeport, ME; and R.F. O’Sullivan & Son, Somerville, MA.