fette sau

 

Fette Sau? Translation: "fat pig" in German. Brilliant. Vegetarians this is not for you.

By now most New Yorkers agree that the Brooklyn food scene has been in full swing for some time and is showing no signs of slowing. Though I want to show Manhattan some love, I keep coming back to Brooklyn for the food.

The other evening I met a friend at Fette Sau, the 3 year old smokey barbeque joint in an old automotive shop on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. It was a spur of the moment decision on a gorgeous spring day. I had always wanted to come but was wary (and for good reason) of the LONG lines and minimal seating. However, this day I was in the neighborhood and the planets aligned and barbecue was in my future. We walked right in at 6:30 and missed the line completely. (By the time I left the line was out to the street, but everyone had a beer in hand and seemed content and committed to the wait.)

We drooled over the case of meats before ordering 1/4 of a pound of four meats; brisket, pork shoulder, pork belly and pulled pork, some sides of baked beans, potato salad and a couple of Guss's half sour pickles. They loaded us up with four soft yellowy rolls that reminded me of school lunch (in a good way). The Craft Beer list is extensive and they try to stick to as much local as possible. They boast the best American whiskey list in New York City, with flights of scotch or whiskey available for the brave at heart, definitely not for me! We stuck to two pints of Captain Lawrence Liquid Gold and Coney Island  Mermaid Pilsner served in mason jars. The beer is available in 1/2 pint, pint,  quart, 1/2 gallon jugs or gallon jugs. The whole place has a bit of a secret moonshine making quality to it. On this particular evening Fette Sau was full of guys sharing a meat/whiskey camaraderie. This is where the bromance and the man dates happen! The crowd was a good mix of hipster to old Brooklyn to young a dad with his newborn baby strapped on Bjorn-style getting his meat fix (or his baby's momma meat fix). I came back on a friday night and the ratio was much more even, there were many more couples, obviously comfortable with eating piles of meat together!

The meat was perfectly cooked, smokey, a little spicy and not at all dry. Our favorite was the peppercorn-crusted brisket. We made sandwiches of the pulled pork and loaded them up with sweet sauce, vinegar sauce and hot sauce. I was partial to the ketchup based sweet sauce, a little spicy and a little sweet. Barbecue is very regional and different from place to place. My friend, a native South Carolininan, was telling me that all the Fette Sau barbeque is dry rubbed and smoked as opposed to South Carolina barbeque which is mustard based, Eastern North Carolina which is vinegar based and Western North Carolina is tomato based. The smoking and the rubbing at Fette Sau takes place out back. They smoke with a blend of Red and White Oak, Maple Beech and Cheery, all locally sourced. The meat is all organic and or small family farmed heritage breed animals. The sides were  deliciously perfect as well, the beans a little smokey and a little sugary and the potato salad was of the German sort with mustard seed and vinegar.

They guys next to us were fighting over the last pickle on their tray as Elvis crooned "It's Now or Never" in the background. "Dude that was mine...get your own damn pickle!" Wow. Pickles and barbeque that bring men to blows... This place is the real deal.

We finished up with a slice of Steves key lime pie, because I am nostalgic and have lived in New York long enough to remember when this guy and the artists were the only thing happening in Red-hook. We used to drive out to his bakery on the pier to buy his pie. If you haven't tried his pie, and you love key lime, you must!

We each left a full half pound or so heavier (and then some!) than when we had arrived, and we we were ok with it. In fact we talked about the next time when we could come back for some ribs!

 

 

 

 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved 

354 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211 
nr. Havemeyer St.
718-963-3404 

sugar house

 

New Yorkers are somewhat crazy by nature, but transplanted New Englanders are even crazier... which is why my loft smells like a sugar house long about now. We feel the need to keep all things New England with us, close at heart, and in doing so we tend to cart things all over the place in an attempt to bring the country to the city. When I was younger it was apples, blueberries and flowers by the bucketful from my parent's garden in Massachusetts. We carefully drove said flowers from Massachusetts to New York City, car fully loaded. Then it was vegetables from a farm stand on Long Island. It has at times been old glass and linens (more than is humanly possible!) from the country flea markets in the south of France. Now, it is furniture, vegetables, wild ramp, jam, great huge dogwood branches from upstate New York, and finally, in an effort to not miss the syruping season, it is sap... We tapped our trees in upstate New York before we went to Mexico. When we came back a week later, we drove up to check on the progress. The conditions have been fairly stellar this year. Before we left we ran lines from three Sugar Maples with two taps per tree into large galvanized water troughs. We sealed the top of the trough so no snow or rain could get in. After a week away we had about 30 gallons of sap. We began our well practiced ritual of carting and squirreling back to the city. We filled five 5 gallon recycled plastic water containers with the sap we had collected and brought it back to boil down in our loft. We were committed to doing it this way or we would have missed the season entirely, as we didn't have the time to spare to be upstate outside over a fire 24/7. So far it's been working marvelously, with the exception of the steamy windows. We started boiling down two mornings ago. We have been at it continuously. We started with 25 gallons and are down to about 12. It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, so if all goes according to plan by tomorrow this time we should have a 1/2 gallon of beautiful grade a maple syrup. You may wonder if all of this work really seems worth it when there are so many great syrup makers out there. For me, making syrup is a nostalgic thing. It is something we did every year when I was kid, sometimes the whole neighborhood got in on he action. Growing up in Massachusetts, we  didn't use plastic  lines like most people seem to do these days. Instead, we drove the same taps we had used year after year into our trees and hung much loved and much used galvanized  buckets and their little hoods from tree to tree. We emptied the buckets before and after school. We prayed secretly for a snow day so we could be there for the final boil down when we would pour the hot syrup over the pristine snow to make long strands of gooey maple candy. We always had enough sypup to last the year, or nearly the year, if the hidden stockpile stayed well out of reach of little hands. I don't hope to make that much at all, but I do hope to create a somewhat nostalgic moment in my own kids lives. I hope wherever they end up, city or country, they become squirrelers too.

SYRUP UPDATE

Day three of the boiling down...

We boiled down at a roiling boil for 12 hours the first day and twelve hours the second day. We turned it off at night. We are now down to the final concentrated pot of sap. The clear liquid has turned a beautiful amber. I am imagining that by this afternoon it will be done. I have to keep a close eye on it now so it doesn't burn or get too thick.

Voila... it is done. I had to strain it through four layers of cheesecloth to get rid of any bits of twigs or sediment.

The syrup tastes AMAZING! A friend told me about a book she read to her daughter called Maple Syrup Season. The book is for children, but goes into great detail about the taste of syrup.The first run often tastes slightly floral and is more delicate than the second or third run which gets progressively darker by nature (hence the syrup grading system) and more intensely maple in flavor.

Week two.

We are now on round three of boiling down. Hopefully by the end we will have two solid gallons of maple syrup!

 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved

fiddleheads and greens

 

The weather in New York City yesterday really made me feel as though Spring had arrived. The balmy wet day gave me hope that I could soon traipse through the upstate New York woods and gather ramp and fiddleheads, a favorite springtime ritual. I am bound and determined to pickle some ramp this year. So yesterday, with the season at our door, I came across some spring greens from another country far from here. They are from a market in Burma, a very simple but beautiful market. I remember that the vivid greens seemed really exotic to me when I came across them in the wet Burmese market. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were not so exotic after all, just gorgeously fresh and seasonal! There was Thai basil, mint, tamarind, baby cucumbers, fiddleheads, kafir lime, coriander and one delicate thin lily pad-like green used in soups apparently, as I was told by the ladies selling the greens. They thought I was really funny as I walked along and picked up this and that. They laughed and smiled as I bought small bunches of greens tied with a little straw thread. When I got to the lily pad green they yelled "SOUP! SOUP!".

The greens in Burma are often grown hydroponically along the waterways and canals. I have never seen such beautiful and intricate gardens. In the humid market the greens are sold in giant piles. The women call out their wares creating a melodic cacophony echoing under the shade of the wet tents.

Whenever I am in a foriegn country, I always seek out a green market.  Both the market in Burma and the market in Jaipur India made me want to hole up for a month or two, rent an apartment and do nothing but cook and eat. I am always so eager to try out all those beautiful fruits and vegetables. People the world round are excited by food and the shift of seasons. Spring greens, whether at the greenmarket in Union Square or the market in Burma, excite all of us in the same way. Take this change of seasons to welcome in one seasonal dish that is an old favorite, or better yet, to make a  seasonal dish  you have never tried!  

Though I have lived through many Springs, I am still excited by finding the first wild ramp in the woods, and I can't wait to see what this season unfurls... 

 hydroponic gardens

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved

notes from the road

 Photographer Alpha Smoot writes in from New York City.

I was wandering home from a perfect morning in the Bryant Park Library, when the rain forced me into Cafe Lalo. Despite it's celebrity status- it charmed me into an afternoon sipping hot and spicy apple cider. I ordered from their cheese selection and was delighted with a creamy, buttery soft cheese, accompanied by toast- drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled with oregano. Don't believe everything that you see in the movies, but on a rainy week day, Cafe Lalo hits the spot. It was so cozy, I lingered for an extra hour over a cup of fresh mint tea and my current read. 

sap for the soul

 sap and dried steele cut oats. use maple  sap in place of water in recipes 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved

It seems there has been a lot buzz lately about the benefits of drinking maple sap. I have heard of a few companies in Canada starting to produce sap drinks and friends in Brooklyn are contemplating a company selling the stuff. We have some friends who live up in Northern Vermont. They are,  among other things, Wildcrafters and Plant Spirit Medicine experts. They really know how to use the land and thier surroundings with thought and care and with a truely sustainable spirit. You will see and hear more about them here over time, as we are currently working on a documentary about them; but more on that later. When I spoke to Nova Kim of wild gourmet food earlier this week she told me that they had given up water for a while and turned to drinking sap during the maple season,  (she said they are drinking about 80% sap to 20% water).  Anyone and everyone who has ever collected syrup has tasted the sweet nutrient, mineral rich sap. It is impossible to resist the taste. The liquid is clear like water and has a delicate sweetness that is so light and faint and almost mildly floral.

Sap has an enormous amount of calcium and iron and other minerals and has been used for it's health benefits for thousands of years in Korea, China , Japan and amongst Native Americans.. There is evidence that Native Americans drank sap for purification purposes. There is a very interesting  article in the New York Times that chronicles South Korean's love affair with maple sap. They drink Fifty gallons per person at a time. They believe they sweat out the toxins and replace the fluids with sap. They call thier maple the "tree for the good bones" as the sap is full of calcium and helps with osteoporosis.

Overall, Nova contends that it, basically, adds a touch of sweetness to everything, a completely natural sweetness. She obtains the health benefits of sap by drinking it straight and using it in her everyday cooking. In the morning she occaisionaly makes oatmeal with it, substituting it anywhere she would normally use water. She recently made a fifteen bean stew with a sap base. She used a smoked ham hock and the sap as the base flavor to her bean stew. She threw it all in a crockpot and let it rip. I love this kind of one pot cooking. I will see if I can  wrangle a recipie from her, but you get the basic idea. 

if you are not tapping your own trees, you can find a sugar house or a farmer near you and perhps buy some sap from them. ( go to your local farmers market and talk to the syrup guys) It does take roughly forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Syrup has commanded some pretty high prices in the past few years based on availability due to shorter sap seasons and climate change. The sap start to flow when the days are warm  (over 40 degrees and the nights are below freezing) the word is that this will be a long cool spring and that makes for an excellent syrup season. If you are lucky and persistent, you may find a farmer willing to part with some of the good stuff or...you can revert to some yankee ingenuity and go find a maple tree, get a drill then tap in a spout, and wait patiently for the plunk plunk plunk... not only will you and your family have a greater appreciation for where your food comes from, but it will be all that much sweeter for your efforts.

 

 NOTE: as with any kind of harvesting...it is important to do it with care and sustainability. Don't overtap your trees! You will bleed them to death!!