Food Trucks Read online

  Beet Home Fries: Deep-fried roasted beets, Kewpie mayo, shichimi togarashi, and green onion.

  “We had some old beets we didn’t want to serve at Uchi one day, and Moto fried them up. I just stored it in the back of my head, like, ‘Ah, we’re gonna make a million dollars off those beets someday.’ They’re basically like home fries, cut into triangles and fried. Then we just put togarashi (Japanese chili powder) into Kewpie mayo, then slice green onions really thin and put them on top.”

  Fried Brussels Sprout Salad: Fried Brussels sprouts, sweet and spicy sauce, fresh shredded cabbage, alfalfa sprouts, fresh basil, cilantro, mint, onion, and jalapeño.

  “Honestly, this isn’t really influenced by the Momofuku Brussels sprout salad. I’ve played with it at Uchi before, probably during the same time but without knowing it. Tyson Cole, executive chef at Uchi, was like, ‘I want Brussels sprouts, but I want them crispy,’ so basically this is what I did.”

  Ginger Garlic Jasmine Rice: Steamed jasmine rice, ginger and garlic oil, fresh basil, cilantro, mint, onion, and jalapeño.

  “Coming from Filipino decent, garlic rice is an everyday breakfast thing. I wanted the fried flavor of rice without having fried rice. It’s essentially a side, but you can put any of the food on top of it. We sell it as the combos below. We almost didn’t do the rice, but Yoshi, one of our lead sushi chefs at Uchi, convinced us to keep it.”

  Curry Buns: Homemade peanut butter curry in a deep-fried bun, with fresh basil, cilantro, mint, onion, and jalapeño.

  “I was working at the trailer one night and I was bored, so I threw a bao bun into the fryer and it came out good! Pre-opening I had made this peanut butter curry sauce from red and green Thai curry paste and peanut butter, but I decided that I didn’t like the dish it was going on, so I shelved the sauce. Then I took the fried bao bun and slathered it with the curry sauce, kinda like a peanut butter sandwich, and to give it a fresh flavor I added the herbs, onion, and jalapeño. It’s pretty much our trademark now, and I love it, too.”

  Homemade Cookies:

  “The rootbeer snickerdoodles are made by the pastry chef at Uchi, Philip Speer. He and his wife Callie have a cake company called Cakemix and they came up with these cookies, plus they sometimes do curry–peanut butter and carrot cake sandwich cookies for us.”

  Thai Chicken Karaage

  Serves 2 to 3

  BRINE

  1 cup fish sauce

  1 cup white vinegar

  1 cup sugar

  1 head garlic, cloves separated and minced

  4 Thai chiles, coarsely chopped

  6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, diced

  Canola oil, for frying

  1 cup cornstarch

  ¼ onion, thinly sliced

  2 jalapeños, thinly sliced

  1 cup chile sauce, such as Mae Ploy brand

  Salt

  12 fresh cilantro leaves, torn

  6 fresh mint leaves, torn

  6 fresh basil leaves, torn

  To make the brine, combine all of the ingredients. Set aside 1 cup of the brine for use later. Add the chicken thighs to the remaining brine, cover, and refrigerate for 24 hours.

  Remove the chicken from the brine and place the pieces in a strainer or colander, letting the excess brine drain off. Discard the brine.

  Pour enough oil into a deep pot or countertop fryer to cover the chicken and heat to 370°F.

  Dust the chicken generously with cornstarch and fry until golden brown. Use tongs to turn the pieces for even browning. Remove the chicken from the fryer with tongs or a slotted spoon and transfer to a large mixing bowl. Add the onion, jalapeños, the reserved 1 cup brine, and the chile sauce, toss to coat, and season with salt to taste. Garnish with the cilantro, mint, and basil and serve.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  According to Mike Rypka, he didn’t give his food truck Torchy’s Tacos (1311 S 1st St.; see www.torchystacos.com for additional locations) its tagline—his customers did. “After we opened in 2006, people tried our tacos and were constantly saying, ‘Damn, this is good.’ So after a while we just added ‘Damn Good Tacos’ to the name because we believed them.” Apparently those customers weren’t just being nice, at least not if Torchy’s growth is any indication. Since Mike left the world of corporate chefdom to start his little taco truck (in his past life he cooked for execs at World Bank, Dell, Enron, MTV, and Disney), Torchy’s has blossomed into four brick-and-mortar taquerias, plus the humble trailer that started it all. These days it sits in what Mike dubbed the South Austin Trailer Park & Eatery, a nice-size lot with plenty of shade trees, a few picnic tables, a covered eating area, and two other food trailers: Holy Cacao, which specializes in cake balls, and Man Bites Dog, a sausage joint on wheels. Mike estimates that the trailer sells about two thousand tacos a day, most of them of the green chile pork carnitas variety, slow-roasted shoulder infused with the bright heat of New Mexico hatch chiles. The runner-up is a heat lover’s dream dubbed “Brushfire,” jerk chicken revved up with grilled jalapeños and a “Diablo” sauce of fire-roasted habaneros, fully deserving of its name. Since they have upped their sales from about 150 tacos a day to a couple thousand, that tagline seems safe from scrutiny.

  Lulu B’s

  FIND IT: 2113 S Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.myspace.com/lulubssandwiches

  When Laura Bayer told her Vietnamese relatives she was going to open a banh mi business out of a trailer parked along a busy road in Austin, Texas, the laughter could almost be heard from Saigon. “Banh mi are like hot dogs there,” Laura says. “They just couldn’t believe I would be here in America selling this Vietnamese snack food.”

  Selling street food seemed perfectly normal for Laura’s fifty-five-year-old aunt, Long (pronounced Lum), who has peddled thick avocado smoothies from her front patio for years. But why would the younger generation, the one raised in Southern California and given every opportunity to be successful in the world, choose a profession common throughout Asia as a mode of survival? “I really, really needed a good Vietnamese sandwich,” Laura says. “Every time I would crave one I just couldn’t find one. In Southern California, where we have a huge Vietnamese population, they’re all over, but there was really nothing here in Austin. So after a few years of teaching here and becoming emotionally drained from that, I just started thinking, ‘I could do that, I could fill that void.’ ”

  The idea floated around for a few years, during which Laura made countless versions of the crusty Vietnamese sandwich for her friends, many of them banh mi virgins. She spent hours on the phone with her Vietnamese-born mother Thao, gleaning tips on how to perfect the lemongrass pork and chicken her taste buds recalled from childhood. She even made the trek to South Vietnam, working alongside her aunt to master sinh to bo, a milkshake made from avocado and sweetened condensed milk that’s so rich, you have to come up for gulps of fresh air between sips. Laura had no culinary training—had never even worked in a restaurant—but tradition was on her side. With family secrets as the backbone of her operation and a custom-built trailer kitchen (thanks to Visa) on its way from Florida via uShip, Laura’s craving for a great banh mi was about to become a business.

  Lulu B’s opened in January 2008, parked just off of Austin’s South Lamar Boulevard under a massive oak tree whose branches shoot out small bursts of Spanish moss. The lot is owned by the guy who runs the adjacent tire shop, which is far enough away from Laura’s cute little white trailer that there’s plenty of room for a peaceful eating area. Shaded by that giant oak, hungry workers on lunch break and preshift restaurant and bar folk fill up the handful of tables and chairs, digging into tightly wrapped summer rolls, bowls of vermicelli topped with Chinese-style barbecue pork (a Vietnamese staple), and, of course, sturdy banh mi, split French loaves filled with the perfect ratio of pickled daikon and carrots, Kewpie mayo (a Japanese brand preferred by most banh mi makers), raw jalapeño, fresh cilantro, and tender hunks of grilled meat or tofu. The lemongrass pork is
the standout, with plenty of citrusy herbal punch and meat that’s sweet, sour, and salty all at once, with the added benefit of slight char from the grill. The one classic that’s missing? The favorite banh mi of most old-school Vietnamese, piled with ham, headcheese, and pork pâté. “I hate it, all that stuff,” Laura laughs. “Biting into that was always disgusting to me. When my mom would make it I was always like, ‘Ugh.’ My whole thing was I wanted to make a Vietnamese sandwich the way I wanted to eat it. I wanted to do things that I loved because there would be love in it. And I focus on very particular things.”

  She’s particular about lemongrass, insisting that her marinades include both fresh and prechopped (which is slightly mellower), and that the fresh stalks are diced so finely that they almost disappear. And she’s particular that the cilantro is stemmed, to save customers from biting into bitter bits, and that there’s a balance of vegetables to meat, “more like a burrito and not like a taco.” She’s also convinced that lunch is her bread and butter, so there’s no reason to put night hours in the picture; she’s fine with the fact that her younger sister Christina is “so over working the truck” and ready to move on; and she feels that even doing $1,000 a day in business, she’d eventually like to shift Lulu B’s into a brick-and-mortar restaurant, where more space will mean customers won’t have to wait forty-five minutes for a sandwich during a rush. In other words, the girl with no restaurant experience knows exactly how she wants hers to run, and that doesn’t exactly jibe with a meddling mother.

  “When I first opened, my mom came out to help us. She was here for three months, until she couldn’t stand us anymore,” Laura laughs. “Being my mom and being Asian, everything was, ‘No, that’s wrong. You should do this or that.’ And she would try stuff and not tell me, like sneaking spring mix into the noodle bowls, or she’d be sitting outside under a tree peeling carrots and daikon, and I’m like, ‘Uh, Mom, we have health codes here. This isn’t Vietnam.’ So she got mad and went home. But she taught me her fish sauce and her summer rolls, and she fixed our peanut sauce. She would walk around the lot asking people how they liked their food, and you could just see she was very proud. After all, she’s the one who gave us the love of Vietnamese food and culture, so I wouldn’t have this if it weren’t for her.”

  Lemongrass Pork Banh Mi

  Serves 8

  2 tablespoons fish sauce (preferably Phu Quoc brand)

  ¼ cup low-sodium soy sauce

  4 cloves garlic, minced

  2 stalks lemongrass, finely chopped

  ¼ cup canola oil

  1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

  Juice of ½ lime

  1 pound pork butt, cut into ¼-inch-thick slices as long as the butt is wide

  2 cups water

  2 cups cider vinegar

  ¼ cup sugar

  ½ pound carrots, julienned using a mandoline

  ½ pound daikon, julienned using a mandoline

  8 banh mi rolls or mini baguettes

  ¼ cup Kewpie mayonnaise or regular mayonnaise

  Handful fresh cilantro leaves

  24 sliced rounds English (hothouse) cucumber

  2 jalapeños, stemmed and sliced crosswise

  Combine the fish sauce, soy sauce, garlic, lemongrass, canola oil, pepper, and lime juice in a bowl and whisk to blend. Pour the marinade over the pork butt slices in a large resealable bag and seal, or combine the pork and marinade in a nonreactive baking dish and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight.

  Combine the water and vinegar in a large mixing bowl and pour in the sugar, whisking to dissolve. Add the carrots and daikon, then cover and refrigerate overnight.

  Prepare a grill for direct cooking over medium-high heat. Grill the pork until it is just pink in the center, with an internal temperature of 160°F. Remove from the grill and cut each of the slices again into small bite-size pieces.

  Toss the rolls on the grill for just a minute to toast and then slather each with about 1½ teaspoons of the mayo. Add a portion of the grilled pork, a few cilantro leaves, a portion of cucumber and jalapeño slices, and some of the pickled carrot and daikon mixture. Serve.

  Gourdough’s

  FIND IT: 1219 S Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/gourdoughs

  Ask Ryan Palmer and Paula Samford how the couple met and you’ll get sheepish laughs, followed by, “Well, we were both jogging at Town Lake, which is kind of funny, since we’re both fat now from Gourdough’s.”

  They can blame their doughnut truck for their weight gain, but go one step further and the whole concept can be blamed on the housing slump. Paula and Ryan started their own realty company just after meeting in 2005 (she’s a realtor and he’s an attorney specializing in realty law), but when the recession hit, the couple were nursing their wounds by frying up batches of doughnuts in a wok on the stovetop. “I was using my grandmother’s recipe, but she had always just made them plain,” Paula says. “So I started taking ingredients from other family recipes, and just coming up with my own creations, and topping the plain doughnuts with all of this stuff.”

  People convinced Paula and Ryan that the results were good enough to sell, so after outfitting a 1978 Airstream with enough fryers to make South Austin good and fat, they opened Gourdough’s in fall of 2009. They haven’t quit the realty business, so combined with their new venture they each work around ninety hours a week. But they still have time when they get home for a little of the R&D that stole their svelteness, with Paula constantly tweaking the lineup of two dozen doughnuts, coming up with new concoctions, and brainstorming with Ryan for names as creative as the doughnuts themselves. Since the menu looks like something that came out of a meeting among a gourmet chef, a mad scientist, and a serious stoner, it’s probably best to have Paula explain a few of the signature creations herself.

  Granny’s Pie: “My grandmother, whose dough recipe I use for all of the Gourdough’s doughnuts, used to boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for hours and then pour it into a graham cracker crust with pecans and bananas. This doughnut recreates that, with caramel standing in for the caramelized condensed milk.”

  Baby Rattler: “I was trying to come up with something to entertain kids, so I looked for the largest gummy candy out there I could find, which is a giant three-foot rattlesnake. I wanted it to look like the snake was slithering on the ground, so I added the crushed Oreos, getting them to stick with a slather of fudge icing.”

  Flying Pig: “This one, which is one of our best sellers, came from my love of crumbling bacon on top of pancakes and adding syrup to the whole thing, so this basically mirrors that by subbing the doughnut for pancakes and layering the bacon strips on top with maple syrup icing.”

  Mama’s Cake: “When I was growing up I always used to lick the bowl when my mom or grandmother was baking, but the bowls with yellow cake batter and brownie batter were my favorites. My great-grandmother sort of combined the two flavors with her recipe for yellow cake with chocolate icing, which she always called “Mama’s Cake,” so I basically recreated that by filling the doughnut with yellow cake batter and finishing it with chocolate icing.”

  Black Out: “I wanted something for chocolate lovers, some sort of ‘Death by Chocolate,’ so I just went all out and stuffed my favorite brownie batter inside the donut, and then added chocolate-covered brownie bites and fudge icing on top.”

  Porkey’s: “One of my favorite appetizers is a block of cream cheese topped with jalapeño jelly, with crackers for spreading. I also love Canadian bacon rolled up with cream cheese, so I decided to marry these all into a doughnut.”

  Slow Burn: “This is basically the Porkey’s minus the bacon for those who aren’t as adventurous or people who don’t eat meat. I named it after the local company Austin Slow Burn, since I use their habanero jelly for this, combining it with the cream cheese and slathering it on the doughnut.”

  Miss Shortcake: “Really this is just a twist on classic strawberry shortcake, and I w
anted something really light and airy to counter the doughnut. The tartness of the fresh strawberries and also the cream cheese in the frosting make it a perfect summery combination—no matter what time of year it is.”

  Dirty Berry: “I tried to fry strawberries but just couldn’t perfect it, so I tried grilling them instead. They were delicious, but I wasn’t done yet. I know people love chocolate-covered strawberries, so I added fudge icing and topped it off with some cinnamon and sugar so it would look a little ‘dirty’ but still be scrumptious.”

  Funky Monkey: “This is a play on bananas Foster, which I’ve always done at home by grilling bananas after they’re coated in brown sugar. That basically evolved into this doughnut, which also adds cream cheese frosting to the mix.”

  Naughty and Nice: “I wanted something that was really simple but still delicious, and this was it—a basic doughnut rolled in cinnamon and sugar. Even after coming up with all of these flavors, this is still probably my favorite, especially with warm honey butter (which you can add to it when you order, just like you can customize any doughnut using any of the ingredients on the menu).”

  Blue Balls: “It must have been late at night and my mind was going in a bad direction, but I thought of filling doughnut holes with blueberry pie filling, and I couldn’t help but call them Blue Balls. I love watching grown men at the window embarrassed to order the Blue Balls, but they still do!”

  ODB: “After the Blue Balls my mind was really going in the ditch, and so somehow I arrived at the Old Dirty Bastard, doughnut holes I rolled in white icing and then shredded coconut. It tasted too plain, so I had to add the coconut cream filling, which completed the, uh, package.”