Food Trucks Page 12
2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1½ teaspoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced onion
1 tablespoon salt
GROUND BEEF TOPPING
2 pounds ground sirloin
1 cup chopped onion
½ cup chopped tomatoes
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon dark chili powder
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 (16-inch) prepared pizza crusts
6 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
6 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
POTATO CHIPS
2 medium Idaho potatoes, peeled and sliced ⅛ inch thick
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
½ cup crumbled blue cheese
To make the sauce, combine all of the ingredients in a large stockpot and simmer over medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove the pot from the heat and blend using an immersion blender until the sauce is smooth.
To make the beef topping, heat a large sauté pan over medium heat, add the ground sirloin, and cook until browned throughout. Drain any grease, then add the onion, tomatoes, cumin, chili powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 5 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Spread one-fourth of the pizza sauce on each of the 4 pizza crusts. Top each pizza with one-fourth of the beef mixture and the mozzarella and Cheddar cheeses.
To make the potato chips, toss the potato slices in a bowl with the olive oil. Season lightly with salt and pepper and arrange them in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake in the oven until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, bake the pizzas according to the instructions on the package of prepared dough. If it instructs you to cook the pizza at 400°F, you can cook the pizzas at the same time as the potato chips.
To assemble, place the baked potato chips on top of the cooked pizza. Sprinkle the blue cheese on top and serve.
( SIDE DISH )
Pulling up in a sweet ride has been one way to get noticed since Rebel Without a Cause was in theaters. Brothers Vijay and Manoj Swearingen know that, so when they decided to become mobile food vendors, a standard step van wouldn’t do. Instead, they purchased an NEV (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle), a battery-powered car that can be charged using a standard outlet and tops out at around 25 mph. Made by Global Electric Motorcars, a division of Chrysler, the tiny, rounded, eco-friendly car looks something like the egg-shaped spaceship Mork arrived in from Ork, if that spaceship were transformed into a mobile kitchen, complete with gas grill and fridge. Pita Brothers (www.twitter.com/pitabros) launched in the summer of 2009, cruising into downtown Milwaukee for breakfast, heading to the Third Ward around lunchtime, and hitting Marquette’s campus for dinner. As their name implies, the menu revolves around thin Lebanese-style pita, used to wrap fillings ranging from falafel with hummus to steak with bacon drizzled with Southwestern ranch. They’re flavorful and filling, but much like in the movies, sometimes what’s inside the ride is secondary.
( SIDE DISH )
A crêpe cart might not get a second look in some parts of the world, but in Milwaukee, Satellite Crêpes (twitter.com/satellitecrepes) causes quite a stir when they wheel onto the sidewalk, fire up their irons, and get to pouring, spinning, and folding. Aside from being the only mobile crêperie in town, Satellite also harnesses the sun’s power for the refrigerator that keeps their batter and fruit cool. Janeen and Dirk Werderich built the cart themselves, aiming to implement a few “green” touches (they also compost) while giving Milwaukeeans a touch of Brittany. The buckwheat crêpes are très authentic, as are simple fillings like the classic trinity of Grand Marnier, lemon, and sugar. But for the vegan set, Satellite veers from tradition with a dairy-free batter made of organic chickpeas, an old world–new world compromise.
LIBRARY MALL (State Street) Madison
Madison has two primary concentrations of food carts, the Capitol Square and the University’s Library Mall. The Square has a handful of carts, typically only bustling on Saturdays during the Dane County Farmers’ Market, but the Mall cart lineup is twenty-two strong, all open for business Monday through Friday, generally from about 10:30 a.m. until around 3 p.m.
The Bayou New Orleans Solid Cajun classics from gumbo to pecan pie.
Café Costa Rica Try the Jamaican iced coffee.
China Cottage Decent Chinese standards with plenty of vegetarian options.
King of Falafel Fine falafel and filling gyros.
The Dandelion Vegetarian and Vegan Sweet potato wraps and portobello reubens are signatures.
Ernie’s Kettle Korn Not exactly a cart but exactly what the name implies.
Athens Gyros Tender and juicy gyros plus yummy honey-soaked walnut cake.
Surco Peruvian Food Traditional Peruvian dishes like grilled beef (lomo saltado) and braised lamb shank (seco norteño).
Buraka As popular as its parent restaurant, this African cart serves up hefty portions of peanutty chicken, curried beef, and lamb stew, with spongy injera bread to take it all in.
Hibachi Hut Basic grilled teriyaki steak, chicken, and veggies.
Mama Aurora’s Cucina Meatball subs and decent thin-crust pizza.
Taste of Jamaica The spin-off of the Madison restaurant Jamerica, this brightly colored cart delivers Caribbean flavors via jerk chicken and pork heavy on the allspice with faint heat. Check for occasional multicultural specials like spicy jerk sausage jambalaya and coconut macaroons.
Loose Juice The smoothies at the oldest cart in town (it opened in 1976) are tasty and all, but owner Karleton Armstrong’s story is more interesting. A political activist in the ’60s, Armstrong was a member of the New Year’s Gang, a group convicted of bombing UW–Madison’s Sterling Hall in protest of the Vietnam War.
Yon Yonson The name of this sandwich and burger cart might evoke Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but the nod to the “My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin …” chant has more irony: the owner is actually named John Johnson and he does actually come from Wisconsin. Clever, and the walnut burgers aren’t bad either.
Fresh Cool Drinks Freshly squeezed juices and smoothies, plus a massive veggie spring roll for two bucks.
Caracas Empanadas Follow up a Venezuelan empanada with a freshly fried churro.
Natural Juice Nearly identical to Fresh Cool Drinks but smaller spring rolls.
Monty’s Blue Plate Diner and Just Coffee Co-op
Portable diner comfort foods and coffee from local gurus.
Electric Earth Sandwiches and salads with a healthy slant.
Kakilima Probably the most interesting cart on the Mall, Kakilima specializes in hard-to-find Indonesian food. Barbecue chicken doused in peanut sauce and tofu in candlenut curry come with crispy rice puffs (krupuk) and a bright and crunchy salad of pickled carrots and cucumbers (acar).
Zen Sushi Care is taken with each Japanese classic at this origami-adorned cart, from earthy homemade miso soup to the futomaki, a tightly wrapped assembly of seared salmon, shiitake mushroom, omelet, cooked spinach, and crunchy carrot.
Santa Fe Trailer New Mexico’s famed Hatch green chiles in comforting dishes like pork stew.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Chef Shack
KEEP UP WITH IT: www.chefshack.org
Somebody had to go first.
In a city with a culinary scene that’s spawned a James Beard winner (Tim McKee of La Belle Vie), a food writer with a national profile (bug eater Andrew Zimmern), and as many Ethiopian restaurants as natural foods co-ops, where are all the food trucks? That’s what Carrie Summer asked herself when she returned to her native city after cooking in New York, working in the pastry departments of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s JoJo and Iron Chef Morimoto’s eponymous restaurant. “It was 2006 and I was hearing about all of these food trucks, and thought, �
�This is gonna be big,’ ” Carrie says. But Lisa Carlson, her longtime partner in cooking and in life, wasn’t so sure. Lisa had a good-size ego and the resume to back it up—she’d held her own on hot lines at snooty spots around the globe, from Manhattan’s Lespinasse under the legendary Gray Kunz to London’s L’Escargot in its Michelin-starred heyday. And now her girlfriend was trying to talk her into opening a doughnut truck. In Minneapolis. Land of September snow.
Love will make you do the damnedest things. Turns out, a little snow doesn’t deter Minnesotans from fresh doughnuts. Chef Shack opened in 2007 for the St. Paul Winter Carnival, and the wait for Carrie’s Indian-spiced doughnuts and hot chocolate was longer than either chef had seen in their careers. They knew they were on to something, but a tabletop fryer wasn’t going to cut it for two experienced chefs, so Carrie and Lisa regrouped and outfitted their 9 by 12-foot trailer with a $6,000 “doughnut robot” that squirts perfect cylinders of dough into a vat of hot oil, as well as a refrigerator, freezer, griddle, and small prep counter. The new and improved Chef Shack set up shop the following spring in the Mill City Farmers Market. Lines formed immediately for the hand-cut fries and bacon ketchup, tongue tacos dressed with corn salsa, and all-natural beef hot dogs loaded with gourmet toppings. “We were raking in more in a day than a cook is really used to making in a week, and Carrie was like, ‘Are you ready to be famous for hot dogs?’ ” Lisa says. “At first I was like, ‘I went to New York and I cooked at all these really great places, and I’m finally getting known for french fries?’ It was kinda hard for my ego, but I realized if you do one thing you just do it really well, no matter what it is.”
Demand brought Chef Shack to four farmers’ markets and drew plenty of requests for private events. In fact, business has been so good that Carrie and Lisa close up shop in winter and head for Asia, living off of $20 a day while getting Thai massages in Bangkok and eating their weight in street food in Singapore. “We’ve created exactly the lifestyle we want, and we’ve never lost the passion in our cooking,” Lisa says. “And yeah, my ego is doing a whole lot better now that the cash box is full.”
French Toast with Shaved Apples and Bacon Beer Brats
Serves 4
If you really want to replicate the Chef Shack’s most popular fall dish, go organic with the eggs and milk, try to get your hands on some bacon beer brats (they use Fischer Farms), and crisp up the bread in a deep fryer. If that sounds out of reach for you, your favorite pork sausage links will do, and a griddle or frying pan should work almost as well.
4 eggs
1 cup whole milk
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of sea salt
12 slices multigrain bread, sliced ½ inch thick
4 pork sausage links
2 tart-sweet apples (Pink Lady or similar variety), cored and cut into matchsticks or small slivers
¼ cup maple syrup
Beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the milk, brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, and salt and stir well to combine. (If you have one, use an immersion blender to emulsify all the ingredients.)
Soak the bread slices in the egg mixture until saturated. Meanwhile, split each sausage link down the middle, almost cutting it in half but not severing it. Brown the sausages on a griddle or in a frying pan over medium-high heat. While the sausages are cooking, heat a deep fryer to high or a heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium-high heat. Fry the bread until both sides are deep brown. Plate 3 slices of French toast with 1 sausage link, top with a pile of apple slivers, and drizzle the entire thing with 1 tablespoon of maple syrup. Repeat with the remaining ingredients.
Austin, Texas
East Side King
Lulu B’s
Gourdough’s
Odd Duck
Flip Happy Crêpes
The Best Wurst
Marfa, Texas
Food Shark
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Que Crawl
Durham, North Carolina
Only Burger
Miami, Florida
GastroPod
Yellow Submarine
Austin, Texas
If you’ve trademarked your city as the Live Music Capital of the World, you better have plenty of booze and the grub to soak it up. Austin has both. With nearly two hundred live music venues funneling what the city estimates as close to $700 million in revenue, the local music industry is massive. Downtown clubs have been booming since the 1970s (in 1973 my dad’s band Headstone played the South Door, which he recalls as “the hip place to be”), prompting food vendors to set up on the sidewalks to offer cheap, quick eats to the partying masses.
These days, annual events like the Austin City Limits Music Festival draw close to sixty-five thousand people daily, all of them hungry and thirsty. Again the solution is simple: a kebab cart, a taco truck, a cupcake trailer … fast enough and affordable enough that their patrons can return their focus to the band onstage and the beer in hand. There’s enough demand for street eats that, as of 2010, more than a thousand mobile food vendors were licensed in Travis County. Many are tiny one-man carts, either pushed to a preferred sidewalk spot or towed by hitch. A few years ago, though, hordes of newcomers hit the scene. The funky gleaming trailers, all retrofitted to deliver delicious food while maintaining that iconic Americana look of mid-century leisure, demonstrate the city’s unofficial motto, “Keep Austin Weird.” In true individualistic spirit, many find a spot under a shady tree, set up a few picnic tables, and hang out until people find them. Others band together in groups of three or more to take over a parking lot as a hybrid between trailer park and food court. And still others stick to dancing with the one that brought ’Em, hitting the streets after dark and positioning their mobile kitchens right along the blurred sight line of those music lovers that keep this city afloat.
East Side King
FIND IT: 1618 E 6th St. (back patio of the Liberty Bar), Austin, Texas
KEEP UP WITH IT: www.eastsidekingaustin.com
In pairs, sometimes threes, people duck into a little roadhouse on a fairly desolate street in East Austin, the first wave around dusk, another wave much later, right around the time the late-night munchies set in. Most are nailing the rockabilly daddy-o and rollergirl look (which is big here in Austin), so it’s hard to tell if they’re headed for the Liberty Bar or the tattoo shop upstairs. Surprisingly, some aren’t aiming for either. They’re snaking through the Liberty long enough to buy a bottle of Lone Star, then beelining for the back patio, where a tiny camping trailer sits at the edge of the fence. Covered in abstract bursts of Day-Glo-bright paint, the trailer looks like the spaceship that fell out of the sky to deliver George Clinton. It’s not. It’s actually the side project of two supremely talented local chefs who met at the famed contemporary Japanese restaurant Uchi. Paul Qui is a native of the Philippines but was raised in the States and has been in Austin since coming for culinary school in 2002. Moto Utsonomaya, who is Japanese, left his country just after his twenty-first birthday to join up with the Texas Eastside Kings, an electric blues band that’s been gigging around the South for decades, backing legends that roll through town and cutting records here and there. The band of Southern African Americans in their sixties and seventies play like they’re exorcising the blues in their blood, but Moto and his guitar were taken in nonetheless, a natural fit that looks odd only at first.
Something like that trailer, which Moto found about ten blocks from the Liberty, abandoned in an overgrown front yard like a broken toy. He and Paul tracked down the owner, bought it for next to nothing, and then went about installing a few essential pieces of kitchen equipment (convection oven, fryers, a sink), all while working their regular shifts at Uchi, Paul as chef de cuisine and Moto as sushi chef. In November of 2009 they towed the tr
ailer behind the Liberty and opened for business under the name East Side King. When word got out that two Uchi chefs were doing late-night pan-Asian snacks like pork belly buns and fish sauce–marinated chicken wings, selling them from the patio of one of Austin’s coolest bars until 2 a.m. on weekends, the chowhounds and fellow chefs came pouring in.
Paul credits Moto with putting in much of the work at East Side King, since his responsibilities at Uchi mean he’s not at the trailer as much, but Moto hands credit right back by saying that Paul came up with most of the menu.
Here’s his breakdown of the eats that give Austin’s food scene a shot in the arm:
Thai Chicken Karaage: Deep-fried chicken thigh with sweet and spicy sauce, fresh basil, cilantro, mint, onion, and jalapeño.
“It’s kind of influenced by Pok Pok in Portland, even though I’ve never been there. I was looking at their menu after I saw a show on TV that featured them, and I was like, ‘That sounds awesome.’ I marinate the thighs in fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, and Thai chiles and it sits in that brine. Sometimes we do tongue, and I brine it in that as well. We tried dusting it in both cornstarch and rice starch, but I think the cornstarch comes out better. And we finish it up with a sauce that has chiles and garlic and shallots and fish sauce again.”
Poor Qui’s Buns: Roasted pork belly in steamed buns, with hoisin sauce, cucumber kimchi, and green onion.
“So, yeah, the style is a little bit Momofuku. I staged there for ten days because I knew Tien Ho, who used to be the executive sous at the Driscoll here in Austin. He was very welcoming of me checking out his kitchen. Those guys are very open, really cool. But we use cucumber kimchi on ours instead of chilled cucumbers. We roast ten-pound pork bellies in the convection oven for two hours at around 300°F with salt and sugar on the outside, and we buy the steamed buns at an Asian supermarket up north. Moto named it. He’s making fun of his own accent since it’s hard for Japanese to make “r” sounds. So it’s kind of how he pronounces ‘Paul Qui,’ but pronounced right it sounds like ‘Porky.’ ”