Truck Party! (Part II) - gastroPod

I told you, Starbury, it's not that kind of truck party. Go back to China. Anyway, as I drove south on Biscayne Boulevard, it gleamed like a shining beacon from a block east: the gastroPod! The gastroPod is Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog's mobile foodmobile, a converted 1962 Airstream trailer retrofitted with a high-tech kitchen to crank out some gourmet street eats. I got a preview sampling of some of the gastroPod menu at a Cobaya event we did a couple months ago, but this was my first chance to actually pay a visit to the Silver Submarine.

Though the gastroPod was set up near Biscayne Boulevard and 18th Street for the day, the vintage Airstream trailer would fit right in along the more northerly stretch of Biscayne whose "Miami Modern" architecture earned it the designation as the Biscayne Boulevard Historic District. The guts of the gastroPod, though are completely 21st century.

Along one side is a station rigged for an immersion circulator for sous vide cooking (he's got one running with room for more); along the other is a CVap Cook and Hold oven, another wonder of contemporary technology that uses a combination of air and vapor heat to hold foods at specific temperatures without drying out or overcooking. Eventually a couple CVap warming drawers will be installed underneath the area set up for the grill.

So what's Chef Jeremiah doing with all this new-fangled technology? Here's the menu:

Having already had a burger at Latin Burger, I went in a different direction with gastroPod and started with the "Old Dirty Dawg."

No ordinary hot dog, this one is home-made of beef short rib which is ground, stuffed into a wide casing, and then smoked. It is just loaded with flavor, and has a nice snap and a good meaty bite to it. Chef Jeremiah gives it a shmear of mustard "if you're nice" and then tops it with "stupid slaw," which Chef told me has "something like ten different ingredients." I couldn't figure out ten, but I could detect at least a couple different kinds of cabbage, carrots, possibly some beets (though it could have been red cabbage), possibly some red pepper, all with a lightly vinegared tang and whiffs of spice (turmeric giving the cabbage a neon-yellow hue?). The slaw was the perfect contrast to the smokey dawg, and I liked the Martin's potato bun too which was soft without being mushy.

Truck Party! (Part I) Latin Burger & Taco

Sorry for the confusion, Mr. Marbury - not that kind of truck party. No, we're talking mobile food trucks, which of late have been establishing a foothold in Miami. This Friday a couple of the new additions - gastroPod, from Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog, and Latin Burger & Taco Truck, from Food Network personality Ingrid Hoffman, set up shop in close proximity to each other, and a food truck tour was in order.

My first visit was to Latin Burger, which was camped out off Miami Avenue and 34th Street near Midtown. I managed to drive by twice before spotting the truck in the back of a parking lot behind a furniture store between 34th & 35th Streets, and I felt a bit like Tommy Vercetti trying to hunt down a target in Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

With truck found, I took a look at the menu, which is short and to the point:

You can get a "Latin Macho" burger, or a selection of tacos - chicken tomatillo, chicken mole or pulled pork. You can also add "Plain Jane" fries if you wish. I went with the "Latin Macho" burger and skipped the fries, knowing I was saving some room for a further stop at gastroPod.

The burger uses a grind of chuck, sirloin and chorizo, and while it doesn't taste specifically like chorizo, it is a meaty, well-salted burger with a subtle backbone of spice that probably comes from the sausage in the mix. They use the double-patty approach like that employed by Five Guys, which starts to make up for the decision to cook all burgers medium-well (though not completely). The burger is topped with melted Oaxaca cheese, caramelized onions and jalapeños, all tucked within a soft sesame-seed studded bun. It is an excellent combination of toppings - creamy melted cheese, a lightly sweet-salty touch from the onions backed up with a little heat from the jalapeños - enough elements to give some flavor variety, not so many as to overwhelm.

Though the menu says the burger comes with either "avocadolicious sauce" or red pepper mayo, it in fact came with neither - though another customer had the good idea to ask for the sauces, which were available in squeeze bottles. I topped the last quarter of my burger with some of the "avocadolicious sauce" - a thick, lightly creamy avocado puree - and it completed the package very nicely.

This was a very good burger - maybe not as good as the one I had recently at Burger & Beer Joint (even if I screwed up by ordering one with too many goofy toppings there), but comparable to - naw, better than - a Five Guys burger; similar in style, but with the added bonus of more exotic and interesting flavors to the burger and the toppings (and at a comparable price).

It is worth hunting down this truck if it's in your neighborhood.

Next - a shiny object beckons - the gastroPod!

Latin Burger & Taco Truck
on twitter: @LatinBurger

In case you just won the lottery ...

The Grill at the Setai (not to be confused with the Restaurant at the Setai), which had briefly closed down over the summer and then recently reopened with a new menu (which, I will note, looks mighty tempting), is offering a seven course "Black Truffle Tasting Menu" for the jaw-dropping price of $360 (edited to add: per couple). What you'll get for that sum:

Seven Course Tasting Menu

Truffled Scrambled Eggs

Toasted Brioche

…………………

Truffle Foie Gras

Confit Duck, Haricot Vert, Mache

Truffle Vinaigrette

…………………

Maine Scallops, Black Truffle

Iberico Ham, Baked in Puff Pastry

Truffle Butter

…………………

Serrano Ham Consommé Tagliatelle

Slow Cooked Hen Egg

Shaved Alba Truffle

…………………

Black Truffle Risotto, Parmesan Foam

White Truffle Ice Cream

……………………

Surf & Turf

2 oz. Kobe Tenderloin, Seared Langoustine, Cauliflower

Black Truffle, White Truffle

……………………

Apple Tart Tatin, Green Apple Sorbet

Black Truffle Crème Fraîche

If you're not quite rolling in that kind of cash, but still have a hankering for the fungus, you can also add shaved truffle to any dish on the a la carte menu ($6.50 / gram for black truffle and $21 / gram for white truffle).

CSA - Catching Up

As a result of travel and other distractions I've sort of fallen off the wagon with my CSA updates. There's not been anything revolutionary going on in the kitchen anyway, so you're not missing out on much.

Possibly my favorite item from the Week 6 delivery were adorable French breakfast radishes, pointy little guys with a pinkish-red blush on one end and white on the other end. They needed nothing more than some good butter, good salt, and good bread. The betel leaves were used in a successful repeat preparation of the bò lá lốt, with bok choy leaves serving as an effective substitute wrapper when the betel leaves were used up. The canistels from Week 6 finally ripened (like the black sapotes, they need to be really soft - seemingly ready to be thrown out - before they're ripe enough to eat) and I've harvested the flesh on these which is in the freezer, potentially turning into a flan this weekend. A word of warning - I wouldn't use your best knife with these, the skin has a sticky substance that really doesn't want to wash off the blade. Nothing particularly exciting happened to the rest of Week 6.

I was out of town this past weekend and Mrs. F did the pick-up, so no picture of Week 7 (though Redland Organics has the newsletter online). This was the "freeze" week. While the greens and cabbage looked none the worse for wear, the citrus was spotty - and sour! Unfortunately the carambola was too. Mrs. F cooked off the kale with some andouille and white beans, and it was delicious. I've got some more ideas for the black sapote. And the avocado may get used for a sample of the Alton Brown "sardine and avocado sandwich diet."

It will be interesting to see how much the cold snap is going to affect the rest of the season's harvest.

Obsessed With the Food-Obsessed

In the past year I have written about more than eighty restaurants. Not once have I felt compelled to use the word "foodie," nor any of the hyphenated euphemisms for it that the New York Times' editorial policy appears to require (as I've previously noted).^[*]

Meanwhile, in nearly half of the sixteen restaurant reviews he has published since taking over the helm last October, Sam Sifton has given us some variation on the "foodie" theme (never, though, actually uttering the word, which apparently has the same effect as saying "Beetlejuice!" three times). His first three reviews brought us "food-obsessed mouths," followed the next week by the converse, a wine list that "may run unfamiliar to nonobsessives," returning the following week to the "food-obsessed in New York."

There was a brief respite, but it seems to have returned with a vengeance. A few weeks ago the "food-obsessed" came back to discuss the decline of French cooking in New York. Then someone apparently broke out the thesaurus, as we heard last Wednesday about the "food crazies," (who know from Chef April Bloomfield - at least the New York "food crazies" do), while this week brought us the "food-enthralled" (who apparently call guanciale "face bacon").

I'm not sure which bothers me more: the incessant reference to what the food-obsessed/crazy/enthralled think or say, or the pussyfooting around over using that most dreaded word - "foodie."

As for the former, honestly, who cares? Aren't I reading to find out what this one particular food-obsessed critic has to say, not what the rest of the flock may be gibbering about? It's all the more frustrating to me because Sifton clearly has the ability to communicate with a unique and witty voice. This is someone who described The Breslin as "Hogwarts for hipsters," who in describing the crowd at La Grenouille says that "some have spent too much time in the sun, doing nothing much more than turning the pages of a book," while others "examine the restaurant and chart customers as handicappers do horses at Belmont." Please, more of that, less about the "food-obsessed."

As for the latter issue - "foodie foodie foodie" - look, I don't like it either. But these tortuous euphemisms are certainly no better. Which brings me full circle to a question I briefly pondered (and quickly abandoned) when I started writing here: if not "foodie," then what? Well, what do we call someone who enjoys and appreciates art? Or music? If "art lover" and "music lover" will do, why not "food lover"? Is the concern that we'll confuse a "food lover" with the "Chicken Lover"? Actually, in his latest review Sifton gives another alternative: "gastro-nerd." I'd take that over "food-obsessed" any day. At least I don't have to be reminded of this:

^[*]Actually, "foodie" makes regular appearances in other parts of the NYT, so this must just be a Sifton thang.