Local Delicacies

Breakfast Tacos - Required Eating in Austin

by Jose Ralat Maldonado, Posted Jan 26th 2010 @ 11:00AM

Tacos are as synonymous with Austin, Texas, as the South by Southwest Festival. The breakfast taco, the energizing early rising big brother, is to Austin what the bagel is to New York. A breakfast taco is required eating in Austin, available at regional fast-food chains and mom-and-pop shops to mini-empires and trailers. They are Austinites' go-to, on-the-fly morning meal.

Just don't confuse them with breakfast burritos, those bursting-at-the-seams paramours of Californians. They might have similar components, but breakfast burritos are all-in-one leviathans of a tortilla envelope found only in a few Austin restaurants. They are clearly in the minority.

A breakfast taco can include bacon, egg, cheese, potato, refried beans, chorizo, barbacoa and migas, all hugged by a flour tortilla. Of the myriad amalgams, bacon, egg and cheese as well as chorizo and egg are big crowd-pleasers. Migas tacos, fried corn tortilla strips with eggs, chiles, tomatoes and cheese, are also much adored. But eggs aren't sacrosanct. "Our biggest breakfast seller, the Otto, doesn't have eggs in it," says Roberto Espinosa, owner of Tacodeli. It's made with refried black beans, bacon, avocado and Monterey Jack.

Filed under: Local Delicacies

Australia Day

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by Nicki Gostin, Posted Jan 25th 2010 @ 2:00PM

Lamingtons, an Aussie treat. Photo: Ellie W., Flickr.

Tomorrow marks Australia Day, the country's official national birthday, or basically the Aussie equivalent of the 4th of July. And just like in the U.S., most Aussies will spend the day at the beach or yes, having a barbecue. (Remember, Australia's seasons are the exact opposite of ours, so they're in mid-summer, not dreary winter.)

Heathe St.Clair, who is the genial owner of three Aussie restaurants in New York, including the Sunburnt Cow, thinks Australian cuisine is defined by its use of fresh and high-quality produce and letting the flavors speak for themselves.

"When people ask me to describe Australian cuisine, I always say we are the thieves of the culinary world," he explained. "We mix and match. On my menus, I've got Asian influences, Middle Eastern, Italian, Greek and Mediterranean. When I'm cooking I'm always taking from other culinary traditions and making them my own."

Filed under: Local Delicacies, Features

St. Louis Classics

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 22nd 2010 @ 4:00PM

Photo: J. Pollack Photography

Yesterday, we learned all about how St. Louis came to be the home of fast food. Here are some of the local delicacies that keep the city true to its hundred-year-old claim on fantastic junk food.

St. Louis Pizza

"We lovingly call it pizza on a cracker. Outside St Louis, everyone hates it and think it's the most abominable thing," laughs food historian Suzanne Corbett, who favors the version from Imo's. Its other hallmark is the gooey cheese, known as provel, which smothers the entire plate. Made from a combination of cheddar, Swiss and provolone, it was specially invented as a topping for local pizza by a local dairy (though the trademark's now owned by Kraft).

Rich and Charlie's Salad
Provel's a crucial ingredient in this salad, too. "It's a mainstay of all the St Louis Italian restaurants, and is known as Rich and Charlie's even if you're not sitting in that restaurant," Corbett explains. To make it at home, she says, combine iceberg, romaine, artichoke hearts, thin red onions and some provel, dress it in red wine vinaigrette and let it sit to wilt slightly.

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X Marks the Spot St. Louis

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 21st 2010 @ 4:00PM

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

If any city can claim to be the capital of the Fast Food Nation, it's St Louis. In a single year, the low-key midwestern metropolis gave America a slew of delicious, if devilish, treats: peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy and even crunchy ice cream cones.

Each of them made their debut -- at least, in the national arena - during the 1904 World's Fair, staged in St Louis's Forest Park as a centenary celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Compared with rival Chicago's fair 11 years before, which had focused on pomp and ceremony, this was about mass marketing and shopping (one exhibition showed the time-saving tricks of cooking with the innovation known as electricity). This fair was focused on everyday innovations, so it was natural that inventiveness should stretch into food, too.

Filed under: Local Delicacies, Food History

Oyster Stout

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by Clare Leschin-Hoar, Posted Jan 21st 2010 @ 2:00PM

David Grossman

We love things that snuggle up and pair beautifully. Champagne and caviar. Eggs and bacon. Cheese and, well, everything. But a rich, creamy stout didn't naturally come to mind as a match to delicate briny oysters. Boy, were we mistaken.

"It's a less understood classic combination, and it's really fantastic," says renowned bar manager Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard in Boston which will be serving the beer. In fact, the two go together so well, Boston-based Harpoon Brewery has teamed-up with local oyster grower, Skip Bennett, and is launching Island Creek Oyster Stout as part of their 100-Barrel Series in early February.

You heard that right -- brewer Katie Tame is slipping 180 oyster bodies into the kettle during the brewing process, which is expected to give the beer an enriched mouth feel, better head retention and a hint of minerality. It's not something Tame invented though. "Around the early 1700s, oysters and stouts were inexpensive and commonly paired together. By the early 20th century, they started putting oysters into the brewing process," she says.

Filed under: Local Delicacies, Drinks

Cincinnati Classics - Graeter's Ice Cream, Grippo's Chips and More

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 12th 2010 @ 1:00PM

Outside of Jungle Jim's International Market, Photo: Cindy Funk, flickr

From dueling ice cream champs to the bizarre allure of mock turtle soup, there's more to Cincinnati's foodie scene than just five-way chili and fried goetta. Check out these lesser-known Cincinnati classics.

Grippo's Potato Chips
The local potato chip marque is almost 100-years old and known for its BBQ flavor. "They sell the spice they put on the barbecue flavor separately, so you can use it in cooking. Just go to the factory store on the west side of town – they have triple X hot versions," raves Julie Niesen of winemedinemecincinnati.com.

Graeter's Ice Cream
Made using a French pot process in which a small batch is produced in a chilled, spinning pot, the chocolate chip is notorious for the meaty chunks of dark chocolate that stud each scoop.

Aglamesis Ice Cream
The century-old company was founded by the immigrant Aglamesis brothers from Greece and is still family owned. It's known for ice creams and Italian ices, as well as hand-dipped chocolate creams.

Filed under: Local Delicacies

'X' Marks the Spot - Cincinnati

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 11th 2010 @ 2:30PM

Skyline Chili. Photo: vidiot, Flickr

Porkopolis: Cincinnati nabbed its first nickname in the 1830s, when the city was America's hog-processing center and rogue herds of pigs were said to wander the streets. Indeed, the ready availability of animal fat was the reason two new arrivals from the British Isles, candlemaker William Procter and soapmaker James Gamble, were persuaded to found their world-spanning partnership in 1837 (the tallow was crucial in making both products).

Almost 200 years later, P&G is still thriving, but the swine are long gone. Chicago took home the bacon by the 1860s, when its hulking meat industry eclipsed Cinti's. But one idiosyncratic legacy does linger from its high-hog heyday: the local delicacy of goetta (that's GET-her).

"It's not really very pretty – it's kind of ugly actually and it is sort of a peasant dish," shrugs local food blogger Cole Imperi. Imperi co-runs the local chapter of tastecasting.com, the social networking riff on restaurant reviewing that's recently emerged. "Goetta's origins were with the pork industry: it's made of ground meat, usually pork shoulder or a cut of meat that's not desirable, with either pinhead or steel-cut oats that kind of makes a cake. You use equal parts meat and oats and add bay leaves, salt, pepper and rosemary into it, then bake. Then you cut off a slice and fry it up in a skillet."

Filed under: Local Delicacies, Food History

Lowcountry Classics - She Crab Soup, Benne Wafers and More

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 7th 2010 @ 3:00PM

Photo: bascha, Flickr

Unlike many regions, the food of the lowcountry isn't based on products or brand names: there are few firms that produce pre-packaged or prepped ingredients in the region (Adluh, the flour mill, is one of the few). Nathalie Dupree, author of dozens of books on the regions cuisine, says it's with good reason and dates back more than a century.

While the rest of the country smoggily industrialized, "the South had an economic crisis after the Civil War and had to subsist essentially on what it grew and what it caught. People couldn't afford to buy things, they had to eat from their own gardens until after World War II essentially." There was no money or clientele to start food factories on a mass scale. But though times then may have been tough, it's left a cherished legacy now. "That preserved the cuisine all throughout the south, and it's the primary reason for southern cooking staying so different." Here's a sampling of the foods that make this area of the country so unique.

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'X' Marks the Spot - Lowcountry

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Jan 6th 2010 @ 1:00PM

Photo: bittermelon, flickr

"It's not low, country food, it's all one word – lowcountry. It doesn't have anything to do with class structure - it's purely geographic," barks Nathalie Dupree as soon as she starts discussing her home turf's cuisine. Dupree should know: she's the author of a dozen or so books on the food of the region, the latest of which is "Nathalie Dupree's Shrimp and Grits". Gridding its reach on a map, she sketches from the Pee Dee River southwards, finishing with Savannah.

Another expert, Joe Dabney, quibbles slightly. "Savannah counts, but it came along a little later." Dabney is a longtime newspaperman with his own local cookbook, "The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking," due in spring. "The heart of lowcountry cooking is in Charleston."

Certainly, it's thanks to Charleston and its history that lowcountry food has such eclectic, exotic roots. Firstly, that now-tony and toned-down city was the original colonial New York, a cosmopolitan metropolis seething with newcomers and defined by its tolerance. Charleston was one of the first colonial outposts to allow Jews to worship without persecution and the congregation is still one of the oldest in the USA. That openness encouraged unusual settlers.

"Everything came through Charleston – it was an elite community for so long. It had an extraordinary variety of people: there was an Italian bakery in town in the early 1600s that fed everyone. And they also planted olive trees there," Dupree explains. British techniques like roasting and stewing became staples, too – a nostalgic nod to the motherland with which Charleston, named after a British king as Charles town, felt such strong links.

Filed under: Local Delicacies, Features

'X' Marks the Spot - Rhode Island

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by Mark Ellwood, Posted Sep 15th 2009 @ 5:00PM

British-born, New York-based freelance journalist Mark Ellwood has spent most of his life traveling the globe in pursuit of the finest fashion, furnishings and food. In this brand new series for Slashfood, he highlights the distinctive regional cuisines of his adopted country.

Photo: image415, flickr

Rhode Island is like a gourmet Galapagos, a tiny patch of water-hemmed land that's evolved a separate culture from its surroundings. There are state-specific brands like Del's Lemonade and Autocrat Coffee Syrup, Rhody recipes for jonnycakes and stuffies and even localized tweaks on American staples; only in Rhode Island could clear clam chowder come with an add-to-taste jug of heavy cream to placate visiting Bostonians.

Given locals' culinary passion, it's no wonder this is where the diner was invented by Walter Scott in 1872, who piled up a horse-drawn wagon with pies and sandwiches and stationed it in front of the Providence Journal offices.

How did the smallest state in the union -- barely 1,000 square miles of land -- develop such aggressive, idiosyncratic tastes? In part, thanks to its origins.

"We have this very independent spirit; it's historic, going right back to Williams," explains Linda Beaulieu, author of "The Providence and Rhode Island Cookbook." Indeed, Roger Williams founded the outpost as a rebellion against the Massachusetts Bay Colony's hardline conformism, and that rebellious independence has ricocheted down through Rhode Island's history -- and menus. "Chain restaurants don't do well here at all. In fact a year or two ago, the Red Lobster closed -- people just didn't support it."

Stuffies and quahogs, anyone? Explore more of Rhode Island's culinary offerings after the jump.

Filed under: X Marks the Spot, Local Delicacies