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We Got Hacked!

robbwalsh — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:01:02 +0000

The RobbWalsh.com “Texas Eats” website was down for more than a week due to technical difficulties. If you tried to find us while were out of commission, we apologize.

It seems our server got raided by interweb evil doers. We ended up with the “WordPress Pharma Hack.” Every time we tried to send a link of our site to Facebook, or anywhere else, we transmitted a message about where to buy drugs online.

Cleaning things up and moving to a new server was a little more complicated than it sounded. Our technical department (Pableaux “Bayou Dog” Johnson) had to redo all the photo links and otherwise tinker under the hood.

Thinking about people who spread Spam (not you Hormel) and hack websites makes me angry. Sometimes I daydream about what I would do if I ever got hold of one of these slimeballs. Hacking is a form of theft, right? So would a convicted hacker get his hands chopped off under Islamic law? I know a pitmaster in South Carolina named Tim Hyman who would be perfect for the job of punishing hackers–he is a sort of hacker himself.

Franklin's Beats Snow's: TM BBQ Fest

robbwalsh — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:16:08 +0000

Snow’s brisket is famous. It comes with the somewhat dubious Calvin Trillin seal of approval. Ever since Texas Monthly rated Snow’s the best barbecue joint in Texas, I have felt it my duty to join the crowd and make a pilgrimage to the hamlet of Lexington. Yesterday, I got lucky–I scored a sample of their brisket at the Texas Monthly Barbecue Festival without a pre-dawn drive in the country.

But I was called out in public for not sampling Snow’s until now: “What took so long, Robb?” asked @BarbecueSnob Daniel Vaughn via twitter.

Back in 2008, I explained my recalcitrance and questioned Calvin Trillin’s judgement at length in a post on the Houston Press blog. To sum it up–Snow’s is only open briefly on Saturday mornings. To insure a place in line, I have been told I need to be there by 8 am. The joint is better than two hours from my house in Houston, so that means getting up on Saturday morning at five something to go stand in line for brisket. Not an appealing prospect, especially when you have a wife and kids with their own Saturday morning agendas. And then there are the doubts. My inner curmudgeon finds something a little suspect about a barbecue joint that is open so seldom. “Anybody can make great barbecue for a few hours on Saturday morning,” Rick Schmidt at Kruez Market scoffs.

But I gave Snow’s brisket a fair chance. And to be honest, it wasn’t nearly as good as Franklin’s brisket which was being sliced a few booths away. Apparently, my opinion was shared by the rest of the crowd who voted for the “People’s Choice Awards.” Franklin’s won the Best Brisket category. And Franklin’s is actually open at lunch time. Kudos to the Texas Monthly Barbecue Festival for providing a chance to finally compare the two famous briskets side by side.

A new feature of the Texas Monthly Barbecue Festival this year was The Barbecue Genius Counter, staffed by students and professors from the Texas A&M Animal Sciences Department Meat Science Center. At last, an opportunity for barbecue fanatics to find answers to such burning questions as: What is a tri-tip and how do you cook it? And: Where can I find an 80 pound whole pig for my barbecue pit?

The Barbecue Genius Corner was also answering questions about Foodways Texas BBQ Summer Camp which be held again next June at the Texas A&M Meat Science Center in College Station. The event is limited to 50 students and is sure to sell out. Your best bet to get a ticket is to become a member of Foodways Texas right away since Foodways Texas members will get advance word when tickets go on sale.

Deli Man: Starring Ziggy Gruber

robbwalsh — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:47:33 +0000

Houston delicatessen owner Ziggy Gruber and his Post Oak restaurant, Kenny and Ziggy’s are starring in a movie. Erik Greenberg Anjou, a New York-based independent filmmaker, was in town last week with his production crew working on the documentary which is tentatively titled: Deli Man.

The director choose Ziggy Gruber as his star because of his outgoing personality and because he is may be the only third generation Jewish deli man who is still actively running a restaurant. The unlikely Texas location is part of the movie’s appeal. “The fact that the best New York Deli in the country is located in Houston blows people’s minds,” chuckles Ziggy Gruber.

According to the director, “Ziggy’s story, including his move from New York’s Lower East Side to Texas in an effort to continue the family business and tradition, is emblematic of the wider story of the Jewish delicatessen; its storied if not heart-stopping delicacies and its reflection of the migration and development of both Eastern European and American Jews.”

Erik Greenberg Anjou’s previous films cover subjects as varied as college football history and abstract expressionist painting, but his particular interest is in Jewish culture and its perpetuation. Two of his projects – A Cantor’s Tale (www.acantorstale.com) and The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground (www.klezdoc.com) – have found an enthusiastic home on the film festival circuit and on PBS affiliates.

The film is schedule for release in a about a year. We’ll keep you posted.

Texas Cioppino

robbwalsh — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:48:25 +0000

Chef Maurizio Ferrarese of Quattro Restaurant in the Houston Four Seasons hotel and I collaborated on a Texas cioppino last Friday. Maurizio invited me to join him in the kitchen as part of the Guest Chef series there. I know, I know, I am not really a chef. But I do work in a lot of kitchens–mainly developing Tex-Mex recipes.

My guest chef gig in an Italian restaurant started over a plate of spaghetti at the Sacred Heart Society spaghetti lunch, Maurizio and I were debating the provenance of the fish stew called cioppino. I thought it was invented by Italian-American fishermen in San Francisco. But chef Maurizio, who is Italian, insisted it originated in Liguria.

I also told Maurizio that I was working on a Texas version of cioppino for the Italian-Texan chapter of my upcoming book “Texas Eats” (Ten Speed Press, March 2012). Not that it’s any big innovation–a Gulf version of cioppino is already served at Tony Mandola’s on Waugh St. in Houston. My partner at El Real, Bryan Caswell, had a similiar Texas-Tuscan seafood stew on the menu at Stella Sola for awhile too. But for my Texas cioppino, I wanted to leave out non-Gulf ingredients like scallops. I also wanted to include lots of blue crab.

My recipe was inspired by the crab cioppino that was once served at the Gold Spike on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. (The restaurant closed in 2005.)That dungeness crab soup was served family style in a huge bowl in the middle of the table. You cracked crab and dunked sourdough in the red gravy to your heart’s content. Maurizio wanted to tinker with my recipe and serve Texas cioppino at Quattro one night. And so we set it up.

Chef Maurizio

While I think of cioppino as a soup, Maurizio put the vegetables from the fish stock through a china cap and added the paste back to the broth to turn it into a thick stew. He also added octopus to the ingredient list, which was a great addition. He put a serving of stew in an oversize china soup bowl and garnished it with a crab claw and two pieces of toasted Italian bread. It was a lot prettier than my version of cioppino. My only quibble was his insistence of using scorpionfish instead of red snapper–you can take the European out of Europe…

For the antipasti on our collaboration menu, we served sausage and peppers to honor the Sacred Heart Society for bringing us together over spaghetti. We tried to buy 10 pounds of Tony Leago’s fabulous Italian sausage, but Tony wouldn’t take our money. Tony’s sausage is served every week at the Thursday spaghetti lunch–go by and say hello. (Call him at 713 591 8532 if you want to order sausage.)

All in all, we had a lot of fun. Quite a few people showed up for dinner. We plan on doing it again when the book comes out in March. Meanwhile, here’s my Texas Cioppino recipe:

Texas Cioppino (from Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook)

Cioppino is an Italian-American seafood stew that originated in San Franciso. Some say it as originally made aboard fishing boats. This Gulf version using brown shrimp, redfish and blue crab make an excellent Texas-Italian cioppino.

Serves 8

4 pounds uncooked heads-on shrimp
One 4 pound whole redfish
8 live crabs
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3 ribs celery, chopped
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup chopped green onions
4 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 jalapeño, minced
Small can tomato paste
1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes
2 cups white wine
3 bay leaves

Shell the shrimp and filet the fish. Make a stock with the fish bones and head and the shrimp shells and heads. When the stock boils, add the crabs and cook until done, about ten minutes. Remove the crabs and allow to cool. Reserve the crab bodies and claws and return the rest of the crab including the innards to the stockpot. Simmer the stock for a total of 30 minutes adding water as needed, then turn off the heat. You should have 8 cups of stock.
Heat the oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion, celery and salt and saute until the onion is translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the green onion and garlic and jalapeño, and saute 2 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste. Add tomatoes and liquid, wine and bay leaf. Strain the stock and pour the strained liquid into the soup pot. Cover and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Cover and simmer until the flavors blend, about 30 minutes.
Cut the fish into 2 inch chunks. Add the shrimp and fish to the soup. Simmer gently until the fish and shrimp are just cooked through. Season the soup, to taste, with more salt and some pepper sauce if desired.
Ladle the soup into 8 bowls, hang a crab body on the rim of each bowl with the body in the soup and a claw on the outside. Serve with crusty bread and nutcrackers for the crab claws.

Texas BBQ Pork: The Brown Pig

robbwalsh — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:06:44 +0000

The “Brown Beef” (top), “Brown Pig” (center) and “Little Pig Ham” (bottom) are the three most popular sandwiches at Neely’s Sandwich Shop on East Grand Avenue in Marshall, Texas. The first is made with chopped barbecued brisket and sells for $2.85, the last is made with sliced barbecued ham and sells for $3.25. But the $2.85 chopped barbecued pork sandwich outsells both of the other two by a wide margin–it’s become so iconic that most people mistakenly call the restaurant “Neely’s Brown Pig.”

The restaurant’s barbecue pit is a steel cylinder type and burns hickory wood–the pork butts, briskets and hams are all wood-smoked. The “Brown Pig” is made by chopping the smoked pork butts in a Buffalo Chopper, and then seasoning the ground meat with barbecue sauce. It is served on a small hamburger bun, spread with a little mayo and dressed with shredded lettuce. Bill Moyer, a Marshall native and Neely’s fan called it “the best sandwich between here and China.”

When the restaurant was founded in 1927 as Neely and Sons, the chopped pork sandwiches sold for 15 cents each. The name was changed to Neely and Brothers when James Neely’s father died and he took over. Later it became Neely’s Sandwich shop. The current location was originally a drive-in. You can still order from a take-out window on the front of the place, the last vestige of the old method of operation.

Two Neely sisters still own the building, but the business was sold to an employee, Sally Cobb, a few years ago. Sally still works as a waitress at the restaurant she owns, darting from table to table taking orders and delivering Brown Pigs.

It’s interesting that chopped pork is more popular than chopped beef at Neely’s. James Neely’s barbecued pork sandwich was patterened after the chopped pork sandwiches at the seminal drive-in chain called the Pig Stand. When you order a Brown Pig, you hold in your hand a link to the 1920s, when the drive-in was born and Southern-style barbecued pork was a lot more common in Texas.

NYT on El Real

robbwalsh — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:56:49 +0000

Restaurant Report: El Real Tex Mex in Houston
By CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN
Published newyorktimes.com: September 2, 2011

In the darkness of the Montrose neighborhood of Houston, the blaring neon Art Deco sign of a 1930s former movie theater stretches high into the sky. Its bright letters now spell out El Real Tex Mex.

This beacon calls attention to a 9,000-square-foot restaurant that artfully blends past and present in a restaurant dedicated to Tex-Mex cuisine. The cavernous interior is airy; a refurbishing turned the hollowed-out cinema — it had been a video store for years — into El Real Tex-Mex, which opened in April. The menu is pure old-school: “vintage Tex-Mex,” as the chef and co-owner Bryan Caswell calls it. Dishes that predate canned sauces and taco shells from a box are cooked from scratch. And they can be “a pain” to make, said Mr. Caswell, who dreamed up the concept with his business partner Bill Floyd after seeing local Tex-Mex restaurants they had loved disappear.

In 2008, Felix Mexican Restaurant closed after more than 60 years in business, and Leo’s, another Tex-Mex institution, shuttered a few years before that. “These are my roots — I knew all these guys; they were heroes of mine,” said Mr. Caswell, a nominee for the James Beard award for best chef of the Southwest in 2010 and 2011 who has three other restaurants in Houston. “I wanted to do something that spoke to the old style.” The partners brought in Robb Walsh, a James Beard Award-winning writer of Tex-Mex cookbooks, as a consulting partner, and dedicated a section of the restaurant to displays of menus, photographs and paraphernalia from some of those Tex-Mex originals.

Puffy tacos are a must here. “You don’t really see a lot of them anymore in Houston — you have to fry them to order so they puff up and are crispy and chewy at the same time,” said Mr. Caswell, who fills his with barbecued pork, picadillo or smoked chicken.

Also on the menu is another dish that has become hard to find in Houston, enchiladas Borunda — stacked enchiladas filled with pork and spiked with guajillo chile — named after a now-defunct cafe in Marfa, Tex., that some historians credit with creating the Tex-Mex combination platter in the 1880s. There are also Tin Can Crispy Tacos, though Mr. Caswell’s cooks don’t form them using tin cans the way it used to be done. But ask Mr. Caswell what makes his tortillas and refried beans so good and his answer is pure tradition: “lard — we render our own lard from heritage pigs. The flavor is great and it’s healthier than hydrogenated lard.”

El Real Tex-Mex, 1201 Westheimer; (713) 524-1201; elrealtexmex.com. Appetizers start at $4.95; entrees start at $7.95.

Peach Sauce "No Minors"

robbwalsh — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:16:15 +0000

Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla with brandied Texas peaches is an amazingly tasty combination. Looks like it is going to be the house dessert at my place for quite a while. And pint jars of brandied peach sauce are probably going to be what we give out for Christmas presents this year too. I have 30 pints of the stuff. Funny thing is, I didn’t set out to make this much brandied peach sauce.

The vendor from Lightsey Farms at the Bayou City Farmer’s Market on Richmond Ave was selling 25 pound boxes of peaches for $35. But when I told him I was making preserves, he recommended I buy “seconds.” These undersized, worm-holed, or misshapen specimens went for only $20 a box. At the price, I figured I might as well buy two.

I wasn’t sure I could process 50 pounds of peaches on my stove, all at one time. But the peaches were still hard, so I let them sit outside in the backyard for a couple of days until they were riper. By Tuesday morning, when I brought them inside, the boxes were a little lighter.
I thought I was the only one who was raiding the box for ripe specimens to eat every time I walked by, but it turned out the whole family had been munching away at them. We probably devoured a couple of pounds.

I set another 8 or 9 pounds aside because they were too smushy, too hard, or too bug-infested. After removing the skins and pits, I ended up with 25 pounds of cleaned peaches. The recipe I wrote for my new cookbook called for 8 pounds, enough to fill a nice-sized soup pot. So after weighing them in, I divided the peaches among three pots. I was planning on making two of the pots into peach preserves and one into brandied peaches.

The hit of last season’s peach canning sessions, brandied peaches are an alcoholic dessert sauce that tastes amazing on Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. You start brandied peaches just like you are going to make peach jam, but you cut the peaches in half instead of slicing them and you only cook the peaches for 10 minutes instead of 30 or 40. Then you put the cooked peach halves in pint jars with the cooking syrup and a shot of brandy.

So I cooked two pots of sliced peaches with sugar and lemon juice for 30 minutes and one pot of peach halves for 10 minutes. I was about to start canning, but fate intervened. A plumbing emergency cut my cooking session short. Once we got through with the plumber, the clean-up, and the fast food dinner that ensued (Beck’s Prime Burgers), we had to hurry up the canning because it was getting late. I brought the peaches back to a boil and was about to stir in the pectin when my wife had a better idea.

“Let’s just make all of them into brandied peaches,” she said. You can buy pretty good peach jam, but you can’t buy brandied peaches, she reasoned. The kids ate all of last year’s homemade peach preserves on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, while the brandied peaches yielded some of the most remarkable ice cream desserts of the year.

“Why waste homemade peach preserves on toddlers?” I thought to myself. It was then that I realized that reading the new children’s book “Go the F**K to Sleep,” had ruined me as a parent.

But there was a problem. “You are only supposed to cook peach halves for 10 minutes to make brandied peaches,” I said to my wife. The brandy mixes with the syrup to make a liqueur. That won’t work here because two of the pots were cooked 30 minutes and the fruit is all well stewed down.”

“Oh well, so we call it brandied peach dessert sauce,” she said with a shrug. And that’s what we did. We mixed the half peaches with the peach stew and ended up with 30 pints of brandied “No Minors” Texas peach dessert topping. It’s not quite as sexy as the liqueur with half peaches, but it tastes damn fine.

Texas Peach Preserves (from my upcoming cookbook Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook)

When I lived in Austin, I thought that the best peaches in Texas came from the Hill Country. Then I moved to Houston and tasted Cooper’s Farms and other East Texas peaches. That’s when I realized that some years the Hill Country peaches are tops, and some years the East Texas peaches are better and some years they are pretty equal. It all depends on the weather the orchard gets during the growing season. This year a late spring freeze damaged some 80% of the Hill Country peaches. The ones that made it are great, but they are hard to find. East Texas peaches are doing great.

Makes 8 pints

8 pounds peaches
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 package pectin
7 cups sugar
Whole vanilla bean (optional)
Preserve jars with new lids (such as Ball Jars)

Drop the peaches in boiling water for about a minute. Then plunge into cold water. Using a butterknife, slip the skins off and cut the peaches into slices. Place the sliced peaches and lemon juice in a thick-bottomed non-reactive pot. Over low heat, bring slowly to a boil, stirring continuously as the juice forms. Boil for 1 minute and add the sugar and return to a hard rolling boil. Add the vanilla bean if desired.

Simmer, stirring continuously until the peaches are very soft (30 to 40 minutes for fully cooked preserves). Return to a full boil and add the pectin, stirring continuously for a few minutes to activate the gelling reaction.

Cook until the juice forms a solid stream when poured from a spoon. Turn off the heat and ladle the mixture into the sanitized jars following the directions for Hot Water Bath Canning the came with your preserve jars.

Variation: Brandied Peaches: After removing the skin, cut the peaches into halves and proceed to add the lemon juice and sugar to the pot. Over low heat, bring to a boil and simmer the mixture for 10 minutes or until the peaches are soft. Spoon the peaches into canning jars. Add a shot of brandy or Cognac to each jar. Fill the jars with peach syrup from the pot. Follow the directions for Hot Water Bath Canning that came with your preserve jars.

More on Foodways Texas BBQ Summer Camp

robbwalsh — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:39:36 +0000

From Foodways Texas: This Houston Chronicle story by Greg Morago about our 1st Annual Barbecue Summer Camp brings back tasty memories. Stay tuned for details on our 2nd Annual Barbecue Summer Camp planned for Summer 2012 in College Station. We expect the 2012 camp to sell out, so become a member of Foodways Texas for 10% off registration and to make sure you get first chance to purchase tickets. We had a blast at Texas A&M this year and can’t wait for next summer. Hope to see you there.

Greg’s story after the jump:

Camp ‘Cue

By GREG MORAGO Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle

June 28, 2011, 3:50PM

1 2 3

GREG MORAGO PHOTOS : CHRONICLE A beef brisket is in the smoker at Foodways Texas and Texas A&M’s barbecue summer camp.

The first thing we taste at barbecue summer camp is defeat.

But if you’re going to get a sobering barbecue reckoning it might as well come in the form of the smoke-burnished brisket at Martin’s Barbecue in Bryan. It is here — the first stop in a three-day immersion into meat and smoke that I signed up for at Texas A&M – that my fellow campers and I realize (as we fill our mouths full of glistening ribs, brisket and chicken) that as amateur barbecuers we’ll never equal the skill of a Martin’s or iconic pits such as Louie Mueller, Snow’s, Southside Market, Smitty’s, Kreuz or City Market. It’s rather cruel, this first lesson; akin to rolling in a Lamborghini to freshman auto mechanics class.

But deliciously humbling. We come to this camp – an experimental first collaboration between Foodways Texas, a year-old organization designed to promote the food culture of Texas, and A&M’s Meat Science Department – to better understand the mechanics of barbecue. We are a diverse group that includes a software developer, attorney, real estate appraiser, CPA, oil and gas man, teacher, construction worker and salesman, to name a few of the professions that make up our meat-loving student body. The class of this inaugural Barbecue Summer Camp consists of about 40 men and one brave woman who possess varying degrees of barbecue skill ranging from none (that would be me) to plenty (intense enthusiasts including some on barbecue teams).

But we all share one thing in common: passion and respect for meat that’s been made long, languorous love to by hot, heavy smoke. We wanted to understand how to take protein from hanging on the hook to falling off the bone. We hungered to understand barbecue. And to eat it.

Chingo Bling in the New York Times

robbwalsh — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:59:31 +0000

UNITED TASTES
Rapping About Tamales and Deportation Photo by Axel Koester for The New York Times
Chingo Bling enjoys a taco dinner before performing at the Key Club in West Hollywood.
By JOHN T. EDGE
Published: May 24, 2011
Chingo Bling talks tamales with John T. Edge.

Trashfish To Go: Total Catch Market

robbwalsh — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:45:51 +0000

P.J. Stoops

If you haven’t visited P.J. Stoops at his “Total Catch Market” yet, this Saturday (April 2) will be an excellent day to stop by. Stoops sells unusual fish that are part of the fishing fleet’s “bycatch.” He told me that a grouper boat is due to come in just in time for the Saturday morning (9am to noon) market.

Grouper boats fish with long lines with hundred of baited hooks and they accidently harvest a lot of seldom-sold species. They also have huge holds, so its easy for the captains to keep much of the bycatch. PJ told me to come early and get some “queen snapper,” a fish nearly identical to onaga from Hawaii. The market is located in the retail space in front of Louisiana Foods, 4410 West 12th Street
Houston.

Oops, I meant to photograph this sea bream from the Total Catch Market before I ate it. It sure was good.