Content about New York
December 31, 2010
With one secret ingredient
For the third year in a row, Nick and I will be spending our New Years Eve with friends eating tacos and drinking cocktails. It's become something of a tradition, fondly known as Cocktails and Carnitas, and I can hardly wait.
It's a given that the food is good. But we also believe in drinking very, very good cocktails. Cocktail. Rather than conjuring up images of sugary vodka-laced concoctions, the word cocktail evokes for us a...
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December 7, 2010
A mad dash for LA's best food in one afternoon.
We had four hours to eat in L.A., a period of time which all of us agreed wasn't long enough. While most people would have simply given up and spent the time driving around Hollywood or lounging on the beach, we plowed ahead, sure we could catch a plane and sample some of the best food in the city along way. So our afternoon in L.A. was spent cruising the endless sprawl of concrete and zig zagging through the streets in search of the...
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July 30, 2010
I’ll only have 36 hours in the capital to eat as much as I possibly can
jamidwyer/Flickr
Next Friday my wife and I will hop on the Blue Line, head north to O’Hare, and then take a plane halfway across North America to Mexico City for one of the most intense eating experiences of my life. As you may have noticed over the four years or so that I’ve been writing, I adore Mexican cuisine all out of proportion. It’s my favorite cuisine--from complex and elegant moles to simple fish tacos and...
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May 11, 2010
"The bacon of fish" elevates this simple pasta to transcendence
You may remember awhile back my lamenting post about a favorite ingredient I couldn't find in Chicago. The ingredient that Claudia at Cook Eat Fret christened "the bacon of fish." Something relatively undiscovered and very difficult to find in the U.S. A secret ingredient, you might say. Well, I'm done lamenting. Because I have found bottarga, the cured roe sack that's pressed and dried to become the density of hard...
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April 15, 2010
Make these ethereal little bites at home.
I'm pretty sure the word "gnudi" wasn't on anyone's radar until they were served at The Spotted Pig in New York, which was when they became a food dork household name. In Italian, "gnudi" means what it sounds like in English: naked. It refers to little pasta-like dumplings that are "naked" of their pasta wrapper, raviolis without anything to enclose them. Gnudi are a bit like gnocchi, but they have...
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January 12, 2010
Can great pizza be made at home quickly?
Idea Lab is where we explore topics before we head into the kitchen. We welcome your thoughts, opinions, and ideas, so please leave them in the comments!
Though I once praised the virtues of the broiling pizza on Serious Eats, I'm now over it. I'm tired of broiler antics and pre-heating cast iron pans to make approximations of Neopolitan-style pizza at home (I've already ruined one baking stone in the process). The fact is, a...
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December 15, 2009
Our favorite drinks of 2009.
Obviously, this site is mostly devoted to cooking, and always has been. But watchful readers may have noticed over the years the occasional post slipped in about drinking. We've thankfully improved our recipes since the very first drinking post on this site, which involved mixing dark beer from New York's oldest pub, McSorley's, and some cheap vanilla ice cream. The result was the beer shake, which turned out bitter...
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November 6, 2009
The Indian speciality is easier than you think.
The concept of making cheese has always fascinated me, the idea that you can take milk and add a little acid (or rennet) to magically separate it into curds and whey. Milk seems like such a stable liquid, a wholesome elixir of childhood, but with a little citric acid, lemon juice, yogurt, or rennet it completely de-stabalizes into thin, watery whey and fat chunks of curd.
What you do with the curd presents endless possibilities. In...
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April 9, 2009
How to cook your next porterhouse.
I'm not interested in carbonizing the surface of the meat. To me that ruins the flavor.
- Alain Ducasse
It was a bachelor weekend of sorts. My wife mercifully let me pass on attending a wedding of an old family family friend, so I had the whole weekend alone in the apartment to get work done. I had some crazy projects planned including a mad braise of a cow tongue, but the first night alone was all about pure unrestrained male...
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April 3, 2009
Nick learns from his mistakes and makes a good deep-dish pie at home.
I was determined not to fail this time. My last attempt at deep-dish wasn't an absolute failure, but it was close. It was too soggy and messy, and had none of the glorious qualities that my favorite Chicago pizzeria, Pequods, displayed. I theorized about all kinds reasons for the failure, thinking it had something to do with the crust. Then I just gave up and asked you all to help me. Ended up I was way off...
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February 6, 2009
It sounds like an easy question to answer, but sometimes even I have a hard time remembering where Blake is half the time (Don't even get me started on what time zone he lives in). I can only imagine what casual readers might think. In the past three years we've both lived in a combined total of 9 or so apartments, which doesn't include Blake's month of couch surfing, which might bring the total closer to 13. Of course, ...
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January 22, 2009
Though I once promised an Irish waitress that I'd never compete in a chili cook-off, I've decided to officially break my oath. I am in the running for the top prize at the 2009 Time Out Chicago's Chili Cook-off at Martyr's (3855 N Lincoln Ave). It's all happening this Saturday, Janurary 24th from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
This is my first competition, and in typical Paupered Chef fashion I haven't exactly settled on a final recipe. I've...
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December 11, 2008
How to make the best burger at home.
You know the burger obsession is going off the deep end when semi-serious discussion takes place over the burger making skills of a cartoon. Please stick with me. This cartoon happened feature J. Wellington Wimpy, the burger-loving sidekick of Popeye. Hamburger America author George Motz found this clip and was there to comment on Wimpy's burger making skills: "Notice how even in cartoons back then they got it...
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October 20, 2008
I've moved to Tartu, Estonia with Elin, where she is doing research, and I'm now neck-deep in a deeply confusing language which has no prepositions, word for "he" or "she", no future tense, and three different Os -- o, õ, and ö (ask me to pronounce them in succession: it sounds like I'm trying to lift a piano). And of course, I'm learning to cook in this new place. Good food is frighteningly central...
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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...
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August 12, 2008
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...
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The other Italian bacon.
It took me almost a month and calls to half the butchers in New York before I could get my hands on a pair of pig jowls. Here’s the problem: they want you to order the whole head. And while I had a wonderful time watching pot-roasted pig heads go ferrying by my table at the Spotted Pig, when it was under the tutelage of British chef Fergus Henderson, the thought of lugging a 40 pound hunk of decapitation around the city...
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February 22, 2008
How to make a better burger at home.
Grinding meat may seem like an exercise for those with too much time on their hands, or those overly devoted to doing things from scratch--which I am. But I'm here to argue that there are more compelling and more logical reasons for doing so: for one, the meat will taste better. You'll also know where it omes from, unlike with a styrofoam tray from the grocery store, which is likely the sum of countless cows...
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January 24, 2008
From his memoir Heat
My favorite passages from Bill Buford's Heat are set in the Babbo kitchen, when he describes with fear and awe the wonder that is a busy restaurant kitchen at dinnertime-- tickets flying, steam vaporizing, oil popping. Orders arrive faster than they can be made; you are perpetually behind. The heat, of course, is unbearable-- like a shimmering wall when you enter the kitchen. Sweat pours down. Timing is everything. A mistakes can...
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November 26, 2007
Manhattan. 1 day. 9 Restaurants.
I hadn’t been to New York since my exodus in July and I returned with a plan. I wasn’t going to waste any moment visiting attractions, or seeing a Broadway play. I lived there for two years, so it felt right to walk back in and get to what I spent most of my time doing: eating. And with the Paupered Chefs reunited for the first time in half a year, it really wasn't that hard for our minds to go racing all...
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November 17, 2007
Killer tacos and no-corn-syrup Mexican Coke
With the time change and a long flight ahead of us, we have to leave by 4pm just to arrive home in New York at midnight (Correction: arrive in Newark. I'm never doing that again). With a morning left and having had scarce time to explore Olympia itself, we asked Scott exactly what to do with the remaining hours. “Well, there’s this Mexican taco truck,” he said casually. And it was decided.
We...
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October 11, 2007
The chef Fergus Henderson, owner of the London restaurant St. John, known for his kooky demeanor and round, large eyeglasses, came to New York this week to commandeer the kitchens of two Manhattan restaurants, Savoy and The Spotted Pig, offering patrons a taste of his nose-to-tail cooking. Reservations at Savoy went off the offering in two shakes of a pig's tail; the rest were left to fend at the Spotted Pig. By five-thirty, when the...
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July 12, 2007
At the Red Hook Community Farm, a farm literally on top of a parking lot. Read here, and see here.
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Since moving to Boerum Hill, groceries have been tough. We used to live steps away from a B61 bus stop, which takes you directly to Fairway, where almost any food or ingredient can be bought, and at reasonable prices (though their produce isn't always the best). But now going to Fairway truly is a hassle, and I don't think we've since been. Shopping in Manhattan is fine in small doses, but the prices truly make it prohibitive...
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By some miracle, my girlfriend and I have recently moved into a beautiful, spacious, freshly painted apartment with a backyard, a washer/dryer, and a dishwasher: three luxuries that most New Yorkers offer up onto the pyre of compromise very early on. It’s simply assumed: you won’t have those things. You live in the city because the people that live here are interesting, and there are opportunities, and it’s...
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May 24, 2007
Lest you all forget my infatuation with the pickled cabbage, it is powerful. When I worked in Manhattan, the attraction to the stuff had me trudging over to the Korean buffet at least once a week. But I no longer work in Manhattan, and while I'm very happy with my new job, I do miss my kimchi.
I’m not sure why it never occurred to me until now to secure my own stash. Like a lot of ethnic foods, I always wanted to place...
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May 21, 2007
Everybody’s always talking about lobster--in a roll mixed with mayonnaise, sliced in two and charred on a grill, served with dipping butter next to a tender piece of filet mignon. The fact is, this animal gets far too much attention. No doubt about it, lobster is quite something--but how often can you afford to eat it? For the same reason we rarely eat filet mignon--and then only when it’s on sale--we don’t...
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April 20, 2007
I tend to get caught up on certain cook book authors, and for the past month it has been all about Heston Blumenthal. Head chef at the Fat Duck in the U.K., his cookbook In Search of Perfection has been fostering idea after crazy idea. In a Serious Eats article, we wrote about cooking a pizza on the bottom of a cast iron skillet, to great success. The best part is that his mad-cap search for perfection is, except for a few...
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February 7, 2007
Check out Day 1 to figure out why Nick is spending so much time on lunch spots in Manhattan.
Of all the foods I could nosh on in NYC for a quick, cheap lunch, nothing was as obvious as pizza. The capital of that tasty dish, New York should have had interesting pizza places pouring out of its alleyways, with enough springy crusts, milky cheeses, and bright sauces to keep me filled for months. But finding a great slice in the...
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February 2, 2007
Check out Day 1 to figure out why Nick is spending so much time on lunch spots in Manhattan.
After a few months, even the finds of Flatiron become slightly boring for no other reason than repitition. I began looking farther afield for something tasty. With the subway less than a block away, I dreampt of being able to zoom up to any restaurant I pleased. The whole of Manhattan would be open to my slightest food whimsy. ...
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January 31, 2007
Check out Day 1 to figure out why Nick is spending so much time on lunch spots in Manhattan.
While the $5 limit I usually impose on lunch might seem low by some standards, there are times when even that is a little too high. Whether it's close to payday or after a long expensive weekend, sometimes you need to go lower. That's when you have to dive deep into the belly of the city to find something even passably appetizing.
One of the...
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January 30, 2007
Check out Day 1 to figure out why Nick is spending so much time on lunch spots in Manhattan.
Good, cheap Indian food should be a relatively easy find. Some 10 minute walk away is Murray Hill, a neighborhood that is also affectionately known as Curry Hill. During lunch, a stretch along Lexington Avenue becomes packed with yellow taxis attempting to find a parking spot. The idling cars sit with steam pouring off as the drivers...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
