Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  6 ounces duck livers, finely chopped

  3 green onions

  Canola oil, for brushing and frying

  Freshly ground black pepper

  2 cups all-purpose flour

  6 eggs, beaten

  2 cups fine dry bread crumbs

  Dipping sauce (preferably garlic aioli)

  Heat a smoker to 180° to 200°F, preferably using a mixture of oak, hickory, and pecan.

  Season the pork butt liberally with salt and the rub, place in a large pan, and transfer to the smoker. Cook for about 6 hours. Remove the pork from the smoker, cover the pan with a lid or tented foil, and transfer to a 250°F oven. Cook until you can pull the meat apart with a gentle tug, about 2 additional hours. Remove from the oven, let cool, and shred the pork. Set aside. Reserve the pan juices.

  While the pork is cooking, purée 4 cloves of garlic, the onion, celery, and bell peppers in a food processor. Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter in a sauté pan over medium heat and sauté the onion mixture until all of the moisture has evaporated.

  Add the chicken stock, ¾ cup of the reserved stock, the cayenne, bay leaves, thyme, and sage and bring to a boil. Add the popcorn rice, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove the bay leaves and set aside.

  Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon butter in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the minced garlic and duck livers and sauté until browned, about 7 minutes. Set aside.

  Brush the green onions with canola oil and season with salt and pepper. Either grill them until they are lightly charred, about 2 minutes, or sauté until the edges brown, about 4 minutes. Chop finely.

  In a large bowl, using your hands, mix together the pulled pork, cooked rice, duck livers, and green onions, then form the mixture into golf ball–size balls.

  Heat the oil in a deep fryer or large heavy-bottomed pan to 350°F. (The oil should be at least 3 inches deep.) Meanwhile, spread the flour on a plate, put the beaten eggs in a shallow bowl, and spread the bread crumbs on a separate plate. Dredge the boudin balls in the flour, then the beaten eggs, and then the bread crumbs and carefully drop into the hot oil. Working in batches, fry them until brown, 4 to 5 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a paper towel–lined plate. Serve immediately with dipping sauce.

  Durham, North Carolina

  Only Burger

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/onlyburger

  There’s no way to determine exactly how many trips to Disney World the NFL has inspired since the signature Super Bowl quip started in the late ’80s. But we can definitely thank the Dallas Cowboys for the sales of around two hundred burgers a day in Durham, North Carolina. “I’m a big Cowboys fan,” explains Tom Ferguson. “So one year I was watching this interview from Thousand Oaks, California, where the Cowboys have spring training, and the guys were talking about loving the In-N-Out Burger truck. That was it. I decided then and there to do a burger truck in Durham.”

  Luckily, Tom knew a thing or two about food. The CIA grad had two decades of cooking experience under his belt, with time spent at kitchens around the country, from Seattle to Austin, Nashville to D.C. But it was what he calls “L.A.’s burger culture” that made him a patty connoisseur and pushed him to concoct a burger “not quite as big as Fat Burger but not as thin as In-N-Out.” Tom secured a grass-fed beef source to supply him with hormone- and antibiotic-free meat and an 80/20 meat-to-fat ratio; lined up a local butcher to coarsely grind the meat daily; and developed a double-fry Belgian-style method for his hand-cut Idaho potatoes, first frying the pinkie-thick, skin-on sticks, resting them, then frying once again to order before sprinkling on salt and pepper. He also purchased a hefty twenty-four-foot workhorse truck fully converted by a Jersey company specializing in mobile kitchens, and since he had already been running Durham Catering Company for nearly a decade, licensing the burger truck through that commissary kitchen was a cinch. In line with his desire to keep things simple—burgers, fries, and drinks are it—he and his team christened their rig exactly what it was, Only Burger, as in “What is that?” “Durham’s Only Burger truck.”

  The start-up was simple enough, but operations weren’t as smooth. Tom set up as a campus vendor at Duke when Only Burger launched in fall of 2008, but his catering responsibilities meant he wasn’t always on the truck flipping burgers. The concept was popular initially, but inconsistencies, such as oversalting fries and overcooking burgers, made their way onto the local blogs and didn’t do much to help business. Almost by divine intervention, an accident put the truck in the shop for a good three months, just around the time Brian Bottger got wind of the project. Brian had worked for Tom in the past, had plenty of restaurant experience, and was actually looking to start up his own truck, so he offered to buy Only Burger, damaged or not. Tom wasn’t ready to let go, so he brought Brian on as a partner, and they got the truck back on the streets in March of 2009.

  “This time around we first perfected the product, and while we did go to Duke, we also found street corners with high traffic throughout all of Durham,” Brian says. “We were putting out a consistent product, and it didn’t take long of us sitting parked in lots waiting before people started discovering us and the buzz started building.”

  “Brian is really the face of the company,” Tom says. “What he brought to it was what we were missing: a working partner, running the truck and working the crew. And he really worked on developing the clientele, hitting the neighborhood parks and pulling up to people’s parties for an hour before moving on, just engaging the community. You can have a great burger, but until the community latches on to you, you don’t really have anything.”

  The Only Market Burger

  Serves 4

  1 quart vegetable oil

  ½ cup all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste

  6 eggs

  ¼ cup water

  ½ cup panko (Japanese bread crumbs)

  2 green tomatoes, ends removed and thickly sliced

  4 hamburger buns

  3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

  ½ pound grass-fed beef (80/20 ratio)

  4 ounces pimiento cheese

  Heat the vegetable oil to 375°F in a deep fryer or a deep, heavy pan.

  In a bowl, season the flour with the salt and pepper.

  In another bowl, whisk 2 of the eggs with water to make an egg wash. Spread the panko on a plate. Dip the tomato slices, one at a time, in to the seasoned flour, transfer to the egg wash, and then toss in the panko until coated. Carefully place them in the hot oil and fry until golden brown. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a paper towel–lined plate to drain.

  Heat a large griddle over medium heat, brush the buns with 1 tablespoon of the melted butter, and toast on the griddle until golden brown. Set aside.

  Form the beef into 4 patties of equal size. Liberally season with salt and pepper. Heat a large griddle pan or stovetop grill pan over medium-high heat and add the burgers to the pan. Cook, turning once, until medium-rare, 2 to 3 minutes, or longer if desired.

  While the burgers are cooking, heat a large nonstick pan over high heat, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, and crack the remaining 4 eggs into the pan, frying until cooked over easy, or over medium if preferred.

  To assemble, spread 1 ounce of the pimento cheese on the top half of each bun, then layer 1 burger, 1 egg, and 2 slices of the fried green tomatoes on the bottom of the bun. Assemble the two halves and serve immediately.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Out-of-towners might breeze past Sam’s Quik Shop (1605 Erwin Rd., www.samsquikshop.com), a squat mid-century-era convenience store, and think it’s nothing more than an indie, old-time 7-Eleven. And it is. But it happens to have the best beer selection in Durham, and thanks to the chutzpah of Only Burger’s Brian Bottger, it also plays host to the Bull City Street Vendors Rodeo, an occasional event of a half-dozen food trucks and trailers that turn the parking lot into a mobi
le food court. Aside from grass-fed patties from Only Burger, the lineup includes sweets from Daisy Cakes Airstream (www.eatdaisycakes.com), Korean tacos by Bulkogi Korean BBQ to Go (twitter.com/NCBulkogi), the made-to-order namesake at Parlez-Vous Crepe cart (www.parlezvouscrepe.com), comfort food from Mom’s Delicious Dishes (www.momsdeliciousdishes.com), fresh-squeezed drinks out of a minibus dubbed Liberación Juice Station (www.liberacionjuicestation.com), and South Indian fare from a red school bus named simply Indian Food on Wheels (parked at Sam’s daily). Tables and chairs lend a picniclike atmosphere, and many take advantage of Sam’s beer selection, washing down their truck lunch with a cold one.

  Miami, Florida

  It’s natural to think that the Gateway to the Americas would have some serious ethnic food options. It does, but not so much in the way of mobile eats. The city with the largest Cuban population in the country is known more for cafeterias sporting walk-up windows, where tanned and toned locals make their daily stops for café con leche, guava empanadas, and, of course, the king of pressed sandwiches, the Cuban. So while grab-and-go eating is still very much a part of Miami life—as much if not more so than the glitzy South Beach spots with pulsating music and tropical cocktails—food trucks have yet to make their mark.

  The city began recording mobile food vending licenses in 1979, and although the numbers for Miami-Dade County reached an impressive 650 in 2003, they’ve been dropping like flies ever since. The majority of street vendors remaining in Miami peddle hot dogs, bottled water, and soda, with the number of food trucks actually cooking fresh food somewhere in the teens. Perhaps because of that, innovative truck chefs like GastroPod’s Jeremiah Bullfrog aren’t just creating a stir when they roll into a spot and start cooking pork belly sliders and banh mi tacos—they’re helping keep Miami on the culinary map, one mobile meal at a time.

  GastroPod

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/gastropodmiami

  Cooking on private yachts and beachside hotels in exotic locales like St. Thomas and Belize sounds like every chef’s dream, but Jeremiah Bullfrog left it all for a 1962 Airstream. The Miami native took his Johnson & Wales culinary education about as far as any chef could hope to, parlaying an internship at Spain’s famed house of molecular gastronomy, El Bulli, into opportunities to cook with the Stateside titans of the movement, New York’s WD-50 and Chicago’s Moto. For those who’ve been living under a comfort-food rock, these are the freak-geeks your science teacher threw out of class for nearly burning down the lab, only now they’ve become chefs and they’re tinkering with chemicals and equipment that equates to hard-to-snag reservations and tasting menus starting at $100 a head. Jeremiah’s time at El Bulli was his gateway drug, and after more tutelage in the realm of foams, Cryovac machines, and liquid nitrogen tanks, he settled into his own style of cooking: part gadget cookery obsession, part Caribbean influence via Miami, a foundation of classic techniques from his culinary education, and that dash of Asian flair almost impossible to avoid when coming of age as a chef during the 1990s. He rolled it all into a package perfect for island resorts and their well-fed clientele, but the only trouble was, those island riddims are tough to hear from inside the kitchen. “You’re living in paradise, but the work is hell,” Jeremiah says. “The conditions are extremely difficult, with this third-world setup where 80 percent of the stuff you need coming in from outside the island, so you’re spending so much time sourcing product, plus trying to assemble a quality staff is tough. It’s always a ninety-hour workweek, and after doing it for a while, I was done.”

  So he returned to Miami in 2005 and turned a warehouse into a trial venue for his vision of a nontraditional restaurant, which Jeremiah describes as “more of a hangout than a restaurant.” There was no set menu, fluctuating hours, periodic events with local artists and bands—essentially a business model that makes no sense to the kind of businessmen with the money to make such ventures work. And so after two years of some interesting food and a lot of fun, Bullfrog Eatz morphed into a catering company, a natural fit for a chef with a resort-padded Rolodex. Around this time, Jeremiah got his hands on a forty-foot-long fire engine–red trailer emblazoned with a giant pig and the words “Mmm mmm barbecue,” and he used the rig for catering gigs. “It was kinda cool that we had this obnoxious trailer and were doing gourmet food out of it, but it was too big and too bulky and just wasn’t set up right,” he says. Still, the seed was planted.

  After Jeremiah unloaded the pig-mobile, he bought a vintage Airstream off eBay and immediately started drawing up plans for turning the iconic RV into a state-of-the-art kitchen on wheels. The equipment you’d find on the GastroPod is the same stuff you’d find in the best kitchens in the country, from Alinea to the French Laundry. A CVap “Cook and Hold” oven cooks food to a precise temperature, then holds it there using what’s called “controlled vapor technology,” essentially surrounding the food with moisture and creating a pressure chamber that keeps it in a holding pattern. GastroPod is also outfitted with three five-gallon water baths with thermal immersion circulators, the devices behind a method of cooking known as sous vide, a technique so popular that chef Thomas Keller published a whole book on it in 2008. A flattop griddle is the most recognizable device in the Airstream, used by Jeremiah to “pick up” (finish) orders that are about 90 percent completed using the other equipment on board.

  With a setup that could make any young chef drool, Jeremiah launched GastroPod in late 2009, taking his old-school trailer and new-school ideas to music festivals, beachside bonfires, and backyard cocktail parties throughout the Miami area. His triple-decker slider was an instant hit: three patties formed from a special blend of brisket and short rib meat, stacked one on top of the other with a shaving of pork belly between each layer. Yep, you heard right. Jeremiah first cooks the belly sous vide, then freezes it and uses a microplane grater to create a snowlike dusting of pork flavor. The tower is held together using Activa (a.k.a. meat glue), then grilled on the flattop to order. For equal flavor but a little less Frankenfood style, the Sloppy Jose is it: beef brisket soaked in espresso-spiked barbecue sauce and cooked until spoon-tender in the CVap, served on toasted potato bread with “Stupid Slaw,” a vinegar-based cabbage slaw revved up with Sriracha. Pulled pork gets a similar treatment, braised in nuoc cham (the chile–garlic–fish sauce nectar of the Vietnamese gods) and tossed into a corn tortilla along with pickled breakfast radishes, fresh cilantro, and more of that Stupid Slaw (which, in case you’re wondering, gets its name because Jeremiah deemed it “stupid good”).

  On paper, the menu sounds fairly straightforward (with, of course, the occasional exception of a liquid nitrogen shake or deconstructed gazpacho). But remember that while the end result might resemble a normal hot dog or hamburger, no freezer or factory-produced package was opened in the making of them. On the contrary, hours of prep go into each seemingly simple menu item, with both Jeremiah and his state-of-the-art equipment responsible for the execution, important whether serving Miami’s movers and shakers poolside or six hundred drunk and sunburned music festival– goers. Gastropod’s success among those with an eye for details and with local and national media alike has spawned private event requests throughout the region, even prompting an East Coast tour last summer with stops in Charleston, Asheville, Brooklyn, Long Island, and Connecticut—exactly the kind of road trip this kitchen was built for.

  GastroPod’s Sloppy Jose

  Makes about 12 sandwiches

  4 pounds beef brisket

  ¼ cup smoked paprika

  1 tablespoon ground cumin

  1 tablespoon ground coriander

  1 tablespoon garlic powder

  Kosher salt

  2 cups packed brown sugar, plus more as needed

  1 cup malt vinegar, plus more as needed

  1 cup ketchup

  1 shot espresso or 1 cup coffee, plus more as needed

  24 slices potato bread

  Melted unsalted butter, for brushing

  Cut the brisket into 4
equal pieces. In a bowl, stir together the paprika, cumin, coriander, and garlic powder to make a rub. Season the brisket generously with salt and the dry rub, massaging the seasonings into the meat. Allow the meat to rest until it starts to moisten, about 10 minutes.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat and, working one at a time, sear each piece of the brisket until it is evenly browned on all sides. Transfer the brisket to a baking dish with high sides in which the brisket fits snugly in a single layer.

  In a bowl, whisk the sugar into the vinegar until it dissolves. Add the ketchup and espresso and stir to blend. Pour the liquid over the brisket and add enough water so that the liquid just covers the meat. Cover the pan with foil and transfer to the oven. Cook until the meat reaches an internal temperature of 185°F, which should take around 3½ hours. Remove the foil during the last 45 minutes of cooking time.

  Remove the brisket from the oven and allow it to cool to room temperature. Carefully remove the brisket from the pan. Chill the liquid in the refrigerator until the fat hardens on top. Scrape off the fat, add the remaining liquid to a saucepan, and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Simmer until the liquid has thickened and reduced by half, about 30 minutes. Taste and adjust the flavor, adding more vinegar, sugar, salt, or coffee as needed; you want the sauce to taste earthy, sweet, and sour.

  Chop or shred the brisket into small pieces and toss with the sauce. Brush the potato bread with the butter and toast in the oven. Pile the brisket between slices of bread and serve.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  When Latin Burger & Taco (twitter.com/latinburger) first launched in early 2010, much of the opening buzz centered around the Food Network’s Ingrid Hoffman, billed as the consulting chef for the impressive eighteen-foot kitchen on wheels. Soon enough, though, the truck became better known for their burger, a flavor-packed blend of chorizo, chuck, and sirloin, topped with wisps of Oaxacan string cheese, caramelized onions, blistered jalapeños, and a lime-packed avocado sauce. And it’s a good thing the focus shifted, too, because, as it turns out, Hoffman is no longer involved with the business. Her former boyfriend Jim Heins is plugging along as the truck’s owner/operator regardless, building up quite a reputation for the burger that started out as the focus of a friendly cook-off between the couple. Heins says the winning recipe is an amalgam of both his and Hoffman’s signature burgers, but from the looks of his booming lunch business, no one seems to care much who’s behind the food—they’re more concerned with eating it.