Food & Drink

A Quart of (Hog) Heaven: Stamey’s Revisited

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In this great country of ours, you can walk into a barbecue joint with a twenty dollar bill and walk out with one and a half pounds of chopped pork barbecue (Lexington-style, of course), three-fourths of a quart of vinegary coleslaw, and more hush puppies than you know what to do with. At Stamey’s Barbecue, in Greensboro, North Carolina, they call this “Barbecue for Six,” but you won’t get any strange looks if you order it by yourself at 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday morning.

Pound and a half of Stamey's Chopped Pork Barbecue.

On my last visit to Stamey’s, I contented myself with a plate of chopped pork barbecue, but what I really wanted was, well, more. And so my intrepid travelling companion and I went, if you’ll pardon the pun, whole hog and got a container of the stuff, along with an ample portion of that delightful barbecue-sauce-infused vinegar slaw and a few rolls to make sandwiches with.

As ever, the pork was tender and moist and absurdly flavorful, the slaw kicking with an acidic tang. The hush puppies were only so-so this time, perhaps because we got one of the first batches of the day fried in relatively un-interesting oil.

In any event, we had an amazing meal of it. They know their stuff at Stamey’s. If only it weren’t a twelve hour round-trip…

A Mack’s Man for Life: Mack’s Pizza in Wildwood, New Jersey

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Forget everything you know, or think you know, about the Jersey Shore, despite the fact that most of it is probably true. You go to the Jersey Shore, Wildwood in particular, for a slice of boardwalk pizza, regardless of what travails you must face to eat it. And not just any boardwalk pizza, but Mack’s pizza. This slice represents all that is right and good about the Jersey Shore.

A slice of Mack's plain pizza, Wildwood, NJ

Mondo pizza blog Slice takes a look at Mack’s today. Adam Kuban provides a nice rundown on the peculiar construction of these salty, greasy pies, with a mozzarella-cheddar blend, sauced by a hose hooked up to a giant vat in the basement:

Pies are built cheese first, sauce, more cheese, then they hit the oven—a Roto-Flex whose multiple decks slowly revolve. It has sliding glass doors in the front and sides; the main pieman drops one in the front while his colleagues check and pull pizzas from the others. Toppings are added above the second layer of cheese, if you’ve ordered them. I’ve never needed anything more than a plain slice here, though.

I don’t even dress mine with parmesan or red pepper flakes; I eat my Mack’s straight. I’ve been enjoying Mack’s since the early ’70s, and the primal pleasure of the plain slice hasn’t changed a whit. Washed down with a birch beer, there’s very little finer than a slice of Mack’s plain with the sea air wafting into your booth and a parade of boardwalk denizens marching by. Well, a whole pie would be finer…

Frosting Delivery Devices: Baltimore’s Berger Cookies

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I’m something of a sucker for local foods—not sprouts grown on a farm just down the road or chickens raised in someone’s backyard a block from where I live, but local specialties that never quite migrate from their home regions, like D.C. half-smokes or Pittsburgh’s Primanti Bros. sandwiches: the type of food that locals dream about when they leave home, the taste they just can’t shake and just can’t find anywhere else.

So when the Washington Post ran a feature article on a type of cookie native to the Baltimore region, my taste sensors went on high alert. Andrew Reiner’s article (“Baltimore’s storied Berger cookies come to Washington,” April 19, 2012) looks at the famed (in Baltimore, anyway) Berger cookie, made by one and only one bakery, Bergers.

Thanks to a dear co-worker who lives in Baltimore, I was able to get a pound of Berger cookies straight from their Lexington Market outpost.

Berger Cookies

The samples I got from Lexington Market appear to be rather more refined than the cookies Berger sells through grocery stores, with delicate curls rather than heaping glops of fudge frosting, but the effect is the same: lots of sugary frosting atop a nondescript cookie.

The cookie itself is somewhat crumbly, akin to a shortbread but without much flavor at all. It plays the role of vanilla ice cream in an overloaded sundae—just there to hold it all together and cleanse the palate for the next sugar-sweet explosion. Without the slightly greasy cookie to cut through the frosting, the fudge flavor is overwhelming; with the cookie, the balance feels closer to right. Eating that much fudge is a bit decadent, but the cookie brings it back to the realm of dessert rather than pure abandon.

And as for the proper eating technique? Reiner suggests eating them the way natives do:

The most popular way to eat Berger cookies in Baltimore is from the freezer. There’s just something so deeply gratifying—empowering even—about experiencing the fudge creme frosting in this altered state. It’s enough to enjoy a Berger at room temperature, but to have the option of frozen? Well, that’s a degree of luxury that aristocrats understand.

While I can’t imagine eating these often—even a half-cookie sates the brain’s chocolate pleasure center—I’m delighted to have had a chance to try these big bites of charm from Baltimore. Now I just need to pop the remainder of my initial pound into the freezer…

Together Yet Apart: Necco’s SkyBar

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Chocolate goes with just about everything—nuts, caramel, ice cream, bacon—and yet most candy bars either restrict you to one or two complementary flavors, like chocolate and peanut butter, or mix a ton of flavors together, so that you get chocolate-caramel-pecan-marshmallow-wafer in every bite. But sometimes you want to sample discrete tastes in small bites. Enter Necco’s SkyBar.

Necco's SkyBar

Four flavors—caramel, vanilla, peanut, fudge—each in its own milk chocolate compartment. The chocolate itself is of standard American milk chocolate quality, good but not great. (The slight hazing on the chocolate in the picture comes from the refrigeration of the bar for a month or so; I buy these in bulk online.)

But you’re not buying a SkyBar to sample 60% pure cocoa varietals; it’s all about the four flavors, which are quite pronounced. The peanut is not peanut butter but rather strongly peanut flavored, while the vanilla packs an agressive punch. I’m not entirely taken with the caramel or fudge segments, but they work as components of the entire chocolate symphony.

See, the real trick with a SkyBar is to eat the segments in a particular order, to balance the flavors and build an overall taste. My preferred approach is caramel, fudge, peanut, vanilla. The two outside segments are caramel and fudge, and if you orient the bar incorrectly upon snapping the first segment off, you might have to alter your approach to, say, fudge, peanut, caramel, vanilla. Once you get the first segment, you can figure out the order of the rest from the wrapper.

Like much of Necco’s product line, SkyBars can be difficult to find outside their home New England/New York market, but if you happen to see one on a candy rack, grab it. It’s two hundred calories well spent. As you’re walking it off, you can think about the order in which you’re going to eat the next one.

(Update, August 2023: Necco has gone out of business, alas. An enterprising general store owner purchased the brand name at auction and is selling SkyBars to a grateful public. I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude yet, but I can only applaud the effort at keeping this iconic candy bar alive.)

A Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, Part Three

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Sarcone's Deli in Philadelphia, PAWith three sandwich stops already in Philadelphia’s Italian Market, one might think we had sampled the full range of tastes on Ninth Street, but the epic Philadelphia Sandwich Tour had one more stop on this street.

Having just consumed a sublime meatball sandwich, washed down with a birch beer, at George’s Sandwich Shop, we headed north on Ninth for a few blocks until we came to the home of all that lovely, crusty, seeded hoagie bread, Sarcone’s Bakery. We didn’t stop in for fresh rolls, though, because a bit further down the block sits Sarcone’s Deli. A simple fact about all fresh foods is that their essential taste is best closest to the source, true for Tastypies and Guinness alike. Forty feet is pretty close to the source, and these rolls were fresh, befitting the best hoagies (but not necessarily the best sandwiches) on the tour.

Of all our stops, Sarcone’s was the busiest. The phone orders came in steadily, even as the line to place carry out orders grew and grew. A crew of four worked steadily, slicing long loaves of that delectable bread down to hoagie size and layering it with meats, cheeses, and sundry toppings. And if I’m not mistaken, there was a signed Brian Propp Flyers jersey overseeing the proceedings. Classic Philly right there.

We ordered two hoagies, though had my constitution been up to the task, I think I would have ordered the entire menu. Our first hoagie was the acclaimed Junk Yard Special (turkey, proscuitto, sauteed spinach, roasted red peppers, sharp provolone, mozzarella, red wine vinegar, oil, and herbs), a hoagie featured on the Food Network (auto-play video).

The Junk Yard Special from Sarcone's Deli in Philadelphia, PA

Of course, I managed to take the picture of the Junk Yard Special with the non-seeded side of the roll facing the camera (I was hungry, if you can believe it, and eager to dig in), but the essential quality of the hoagie’s construction can be seen. There’s so much going on at once in this hoagie. The herbs and red wine vinegar help to tie everything together, and the variety of textures at play—the soft, oily red pepper, the salty smoothness of the cheeses, the crack of the crust—made for an incredible gustatory experience. This is high food art right here.

And yet, our second Sarcone’s hoagie, The C.C. (roast beef, sauteed spinach, roasted garlic, sharp provolone, Balsamic vinegar, oil), proved a point I’ve come to realize about truly, truly great sandwiches.

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A Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, Part Two

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The first day of the Philadelphia Sandwich Tour, scrumptious as it was, served merely as appetizer. Cue the music from Rocky, because day two is the main event, taking place in Philadelphia’s sandwich epicenter, the Italian Market.

Truth be told, the Italian Market is only nominally Italian these days. As we walked along South Ninth Street, we saw tons of Asian and Hispanic markets, including a live poultry shop, and had our gustatory purpose been less narrowly defined, we’d have eagerly stopped in a taqueria or a dim sum restaurant. But this is not a Philadelphia Burrito Tour, so on to the sandwiches!

We took SEPTA’s Broad Street Line to Ellsworth-Federal and walked a few blocks down Federal to one of Philadelphia’s most famous hoagie shops, Chickie’s Italian Deli. Rick Sebak’s Sandwiches That You Will Like, the Citizen Kane of sandwich documentaries, profiled Chickie’s, and I was afraid that it would be crowded from the get-go, but given the cold weather, we were the only customers when we arrived around 11 A.M. on a Saturday morning. I hadn’t counted on the shop being quite so small—really just a narrow aisle upon entry where you place your order, with the rest of the shop given over to the food preparation area. So, we sat outside, in the cold. We sacrifice for our art.

VIP Seating at Chickie's Italian Deli!

The owners and staff were busy making catered sandwich platters, but they gave our order priority when we walked in. Given the number of sandwiches that we would be eating throughout the day, I opted for small size, and person behind the counter gave me a look and pointed to the sample roll for the small size—not a seeded Sarcone’s roll cut from a larger loaf, like the medium and large sizes, but a plain, single-serve roll. I must not have had enough coffee, because I still picked the small size regardless. Don’t order the small at Chickie’s! The roll is so important to a proper hoagie, and I made a rookie mistake.

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